XboxandMicrosoftwill have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the Activision/Blizzard deal over the line,but the latest FTC ruling was a big one- or perhaps a small one, since smaller hoops are harder to jump through. In any case, it was a significant obstacle for Xbox to overcome, but those celebrating are short-sighted. This is one of the biggest deals in both tech and entertainment history, butPlayStationdecided to put all of its eggs in one basket and, well, you know what they say about that.
Judge Corley oversaw the case, and called it “the largest in tech history”. However, despite Corley’s claims, it doesn’t feel like it has been treated this way. He said in the ruling, “It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keepCall of Dutyon PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox,” which gets right to the heart of the problem -this should not have been about Call of Duty in the first place. Call of Duty is just one game, and while it makes a lot of money, Xbox’s position has always been that it plans to profit off the game through sales and microtransactions, exactly as the game has always made its billions, rather than through exclusivity - a position that all of the evidence supported.
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The ruling does also mention cloud gaming, but it reads like an afterthought, as it did throughout the case itself. The case was entirely around Call of Duty, and that meant the mountain Xbox had to climb was reduced to a molehill. It was also noted that the FTC’s case relied too much on the testimony of Jim Ryan, a more biased witness you could not find without going to an Xbox Fell Over And Crushed My Cat support group. As PlayStation head, Ryan only appeared via video link up, and his case was blown apartby internal emails reassuring his team that Call of Duty would stay on Playstation. Because the case was assembled to specifically be against Microsoft owning Activision (and even more specifically, Xbox owning Call of Duty), rather than about the dangers of a company as big as Microsoft merging with a company as big as Activision, all Microsoft had to prove was that it would share Call of Duty to get the whole deal cleared.
This is the part where I get accused of bias too. For many people, there are only two ways to look at this acquisition - you can either root forSonyand hope it fails, or root for Xbox and hope it succeeds. This won’t be grounded in rational thinking over business monopolisation and conglomerisation, but instead by a simple preference. You’ve played Xbox all your life so you want Microsoft to win, or you’ve played PlayStation all your life so you want Sony to. You preferFableandHaloso you want Microsoft to win, or you preferGod of WarandThe Last of Usso you want Sony to. You prefer green so you want Microsoft to win, or you prefer blue so you want Sony to.This footballification of gaming consoleswas weird when it was just flaming each other on forums, and when $70 billion acquisitions are involved, it becomes dangerous.
I believeXbox buying Activision is a bad thing, not because of Call of Duty (or indeed any exclusives), but because Activision already has a habit of squeezing its smallest teams into the meat grinder of its most profitable games. All Xbox will do is provide more meat grinders. It not only shrinks the pool of games available for players and therefore the creative outlets for the artists who make them, it also shrinks the job pool. If you leave a studio because you don’t like the way they do business or because you have been harassed or forced, your prospects are limited when the owners of that studio own the 17 others you might otherwise have gone to.
The dangers, for consumers, creatively, and for job prospects, are the real reason why the Activision deal is bad news. ButSony cannot raise that complaintbecause,as Xbox CEO Satya Nadella said during the trial, it was Sony who made these the rules of the game. Sony has enjoyed huge success over the past few generations due to being the place to go for prestige gaming experiences. If you want God of War, The Last of Us,Spider-Man,Ghost of Tsushima,Horizon,Days Gone, and so many others, you want a PlayStation. Even during this acquisition case, Sony has kept up the trend, merging with Haven,Bungie, Right Stuff, Pixomondo, Firewalk, and more since Microsoft announced the Activision deal.
Sony is also solid proof of the concerns many hold for Xbox now -Sony has a specific formula that all of its triple-A games are tied to, withmore experimental thinking left at the door. It’s not going to abandon this formula - or stop acquiring studios and relying on triple-A exclusives - any time soon, so it could not make this the attack line. Instead it went after Call of Duty specifically, perhaps thinking that it was so well known beyond gaming it would win over less tech-savvy judges, or maybe believing that Xbox would be caught in a lie about its pledge to keep it on PlayStation. That proved to be a fatal mistake.
Xbox fans will celebrate, and PlayStation fans will console themselves that Sony has been keeping its big reveals back and will soon unfurl a bunch of upcoming games able to turn the tide once more. But this ruling is bigger than which colour console will have better games out by Christmas, or next summer, or 2025. This is a foundation shifting deal that makes it harder than ever for smaller studios to compete and limits opportunities for thousands of developers. We all lost this one.
