• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Microsoft / Activision Deal Approval Watch |OT| (MS/ABK close)

Do you believe the deal will be approved?


  • Total voters
    886
  • Poll closed .
Status
Not open for further replies.

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
so Microsoft madeup the fake 150 Million players by counting even the free membership of geforce NOW
but CMA saw through it they really went into it with a microscope genius :messenger_open_mouth:

"Microsoft was silent on whether CoD would become available to the 18 million free members(geforce free membership). This third party also told us that it would not be 'economically sound' for Microsoft to make CoD available to trial subscribers with free accounts when tens of millions of avid fans were willing to pay $70 to buy the latest game."

This doesn't make a blind bit of sense though as you have to own the game to be able to play it on geforce now regardless of the tier you are on. It's stuff like this that makes me think that MS might have a chance of getting this back in front of the CMA.
 
Last edited:

Alex Scott

Member
Looks like MS got a 10 year deal instead.

abc637228103927b9184f9d6b8638e7e_w200.gif
And it only cost MS 3 billion dollars.
 

XesqueVara

Member

Dindn't viewed that, Honestly i don't think that's a problem if the Studio don't over relies on them tbh, 343 is mostly a outlier because around 90% staff was contractors, Playground was using Contractors since they were just a Forza studio so they will be fine.
 

PaintTinJr

Member
Not sure if this was posted.



For someone that is on Microsoft's payroll you would think Florian would educate himself to know that no individual person at the CMA made that decision, and it was a large panel of experts collectively reaching the decision.

Him trying to single out the person that delivered the news - internet bullying as best he can - and then wrongfully thinking if she gets hounded she'll change her mind, and then wrongfully believing she'd have the power to change the decision for his employer's benefit is delusions .of grandeur.

edit:
Also interesting to see they are paying someone working an old misogynistic angle - I assume he is saying they've no place having equally powerful jobs as men to preside over Microsoft's senior management men's globalized strategies?
 
Last edited:

demigod

Member
I'll speak from personal experience dealing with, working for, and working around Microsoft over the years, but my perspective is this: they do not admit mistakes, ever. They just go silent and make a PR spin to obfuscate issues.

Phil Spencer has been with Microsoft for 20 years, give or take, and has been heading up the Xbox publishing efforts for at least 15 of those years. 20 years in Corporate America is a LONG time. At this point, Phil has hit as high a point as an executive given the performance of the division he has operating has had during his tenure; the literal embodiment of failing upwards. It would be insanely easy to sell a narrative that Phil has decided to retire and spend more time with his family.

A lot of people bought the notion that Bonnie Ross left Halo/343 of her own volition to spend more time with her family, but anyone who is in the know knows that is a flat out lie, and that she was merely the very first part of attempting to restructure the org heading up Halo to try and see if they can salvage the reputation and importance of the IP for their publishing strategy. Their corporate culture is not one where they make a public firing and admit mistakes like this unless its absolutely necessary, and all of their efforts for a decade+ now have been spent on building an unimpeachable brand around Phil Spencer, despite the shoddy leadership history of the division under his watch. Heck, they even have people internally who just play on Spencer's public-facing Xbox account, just to sell the image of him being 'one of the gamers'.
I bet he has other folks using his twitter account for PR as well.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
I'll speak from personal experience dealing with, working for, and working around Microsoft over the years, but my perspective is this: they do not admit mistakes, ever. They just go silent and make a PR spin to obfuscate issues.

Phil Spencer has been with Microsoft for 20 years, give or take, and has been heading up the Xbox publishing efforts for at least 15 of those years. 20 years in Corporate America is a LONG time. At this point, Phil has hit as high a point as an executive given the performance of the division he has operating has had during his tenure; the literal embodiment of failing upwards. It would be insanely easy to sell a narrative that Phil has decided to retire and spend more time with his family.

A lot of people bought the notion that Bonnie Ross left Halo/343 of her own volition to spend more time with her family, but anyone who is in the know knows that is a flat out lie, and that she was merely the very first part of attempting to restructure the org heading up Halo to try and see if they can salvage the reputation and importance of the IP for their publishing strategy. Their corporate culture is not one where they make a public firing and admit mistakes like this unless its absolutely necessary, and all of their efforts for a decade+ now have been spent on building an unimpeachable brand around Phil Spencer, despite the shoddy leadership history of the division under his watch. Heck, they even have people internally who just play on Spencer's public-facing Xbox account, just to sell the image of him being 'one of the gamers'.


rQYKOJO.gif



He ain't going anywhere.
 

poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
"Microsoft was silent on whether CoD would become available to the 18 million free members(geforce free membership). This third party also told us that it would not be 'economically sound' for Microsoft to make CoD available to trial subscribers with free accounts when tens of millions of avid fans were willing to pay $70 to buy the latest game."

It's not just me right? This doesnt make any sense seeing as you would have had to purchase the game at $70 to play on any tier of GeForce Now.
I wonder if this is the same third party who said that Nvidia wouldn't be ok with MS retaining 100% of the game revenue when this is their actual business model and the same or better deal than they have for every game on their service.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
For ms first party games yes im sure they are willing. Look at EA play.

EA Play is a whole another thing, they're purely a third party publisher. Out of the big 3 console manufacturers, MS is probably the only one who wouldn't have much issues having their first party games or services be on other vendors. Sony and Nintendo, not so much for either having theirs, or gettings others on their hardware.
 
Last edited:

demigod

Member
I just think this day one gamepass AAA games are unsustainable... maybe MS was banking on this ABK purchase to keep this plan... and now they will have to rethink... who knows.. is a trillion dollar company not used to loose
What AAA? Have you seen their output?
 
What's the bad math?

That math error only affected the console SLC. They fixed it and then dropped the console argument.

Doesn't mean it's going to affect their final decision. They already demonstrated that they corrected a mistake that others identified. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with their final decision.

But if there is a mistake Microsoft will identify It and present it during the appeal. Doesn't mean its going to be easy though.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/16/23642922/microsoft-uk-cma-response-math-activision-blizzard-deal

“Unfortunately, there are clear errors in the figures being used to value the small number of Sony customers who might move to Xbox in the absence of Call of Duty (CoD),” says Rima Alaily, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. “As we’ve always said, any realistic modeling of the true cost of removing CoD from PlayStation players clearly demonstrates that there is absolutely no financial incentive for us to do so. Which is why we have repeatedly said we won’t. Our actions demonstrate that we want to bring more games to more people, not less.”

To sum up this math error supported one of their two concerns. Which lead to them rejecting Sonys argument and focusing on the cloud segment. This math error didn't affect the second concern.
 
Last edited:

XesqueVara

Member
No, they went under the radar because for more than a decade, money was essentially free and thus a lot of fiscally-unwise business plans were able to happen.

Now investors will absolutely have more scrutiny over everything, this isn't limited to Xbox, Playstation has its own things that can be looked at as inefficiency as well, such as PSVR or some of their less-profitable studios.
Investors just care for Azure growth dude, even in Earnings Calls after the acquisition happened they didn't care for it, They just want that Massive Cloud growing.
 

Poltz

Member
Microsoft were very clever to paint Sony as the bad guy throughout the whole deal. Their biggest hurdle was the cloud stuff where they hold ownership of Windows as a platform for all cloud gaming services to pay them licensing fees. Azure is advantage in the future for hosting cloud gaming services. Brad Smith, Lulu and Phil always were talking about Sony but never about the monopoly windows has. Interesting stuff.
 
Last edited:

Daneel Elijah

Gold Member
Xbone launch was a fucking disaster, ABK deal falling isn't in the same level.
Depends on who you are asking. Do you believe that a perfect Xbox one launch would have led to 3 billions more profits than what really happened? Do you believe that xbox one launch is worth the worsening relations with regulators? Worth the new infos revealing some of Microsoft PR lies? Xbox one was a Xbox didaster. ABK is a Microsoft failure. They will feel this a lot more than they felt the 360 rrod for example. And back then the Xbox division changed their leadership more often than they are doing it now. Not to say that someone HAS to get fired. But that as some of us want to get all this behind us, and a departure is often the natural conclusion of a failed strategy.
 

XesqueVara

Member
Depends on who you are asking. Do you believe that a perfect Xbox one launch would have led to 3 billions more profits than what really happened? Do you believe that xbox one launch is worth the worsening relations with regulators? Worth the new infos revealing some of Microsoft PR lies? Xbox one was a Xbox didaster. ABK is a Microsoft failure. They will feel this a lot more than they felt the 360 rrod for example. And back then the Xbox division changed their leadership more often than they are doing it now. Not to say that someone HAS to get fired. But that as some of us want to get all this behind us, and a departure is often the natural conclusion of a failed strategy.
So nadella it is, Phil simply wasn't responsible for a 70B deal its way higher than his league, and the messaging about this deal was pratically handled by brad smith, most of the PR at this point is made by him.
"ABK is a Microsoft Failure" dude you are overstimating the impact over this deal to Microsoft.
 

Nydius

Member
Why? Phil wasn't the one who gave the go ahead for this deal to happen, it was Nadella.
You act like that matters. The people at the very top won’t go but they’ll sure as hell find someone to throw under the bus to save their hides. I just don’t think it will be Phil. I’m thinking Brad Smith will be the sacrifice, especially given how vocal he’s currently being.
 

XesqueVara

Member
It's never just that. If Xbox is indeed bringing down the profitability of the company, investors would like to be done with it or change its leadership, so they start earning, say, $10 instead of $8.
If MS thought like that they should have ended bing a long time ago, and yet they are adding ChatGPT on It descreasing the margins they could gain with it lol.
 

Daneel Elijah

Gold Member
So nadella it is, Phil simply wasn't responsible for a 70B deal its way higher than his league, and the messaging about this deal was pratically handled by brad smith, most of the PR at this point is made by him.
"ABK is a Microsoft Failure" dude you are overstimating the impact over this deal to Microsoft.
Nadella is making Microsoft doing what they have been trying of doing since a decade or two. They beat all the other tech giants to the AI, especially Google. They put their services on a cloud and now have subscriptions for all of them running and giving them record revenue and profits. Their Azure cloud tech is good and they are in a good position compared to competitors like Amazon AWS. Nadella is safe as fuck.

And yes, this is not a huge setback to Microsoft. Because once again, Microsoft is huge. But in objective terms this is worse than the 360 rrod and the xbox one launch. Unless you consider those 3 event inevitable. Or that 3 billions are not a lot of money. Once again I do not advocate for someone to be fired. Just that it would be a strong sign of Xbox changing their strategy. I would prefer them to continue with Phil, as he really was and still is a good salesman and hypeman for them. But I can understand that some people want him to go, or can't see 3 billions dollars leave without someone paying for it.
 

bitbydeath

Gold Member
Nadella still the responsible tho.
Then he would get out because MS gaming performance, not because the deal is falling lol.
Phil being given the boot shouldn’t come as a shock. The guys physically shown the stress he’s under with this deal by gaining a ton of weight and looking really sick.

That’s not the sign of someone who is carefree about their job.
 
Last edited:

Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
If MS thought like that they should have ended bing a long time ago, and yet they are adding ChatGPT on It descreasing the margins they could gain with it lol.
They did. After Xbox One launch, they changed the leadership and later decided to shut down the division.

Phil Spencer pitched the idea of Cloud gaming and reaching out to 3 billion gamers, and that's what they have been working towards for the last 7-8 years.

They'd review the performance and may decide to continue or take action once again if the performance isn't up to par -- especially now that they also have to pay $3 billion in penalty.
 

ulantan

Member
Microsoft were very clever to paint Sony as the bad guy throughout the whole deal. Their biggest hurdle was the cloud stuff where they hold ownership of Windows as a platform for all cloud gaming services to pay them licensing fees. Azure is advantage in the future for hosting cloud gaming services. Brad Smith, Lulu and Phil always were talking about Sony but never about the monopoly windows has. Interesting stuff.
It was a gamble that fooled the public but I don't know how they pivot thier pr machine now. It's probably created both activision and Microsoft more problems in markets that they need to succeed. On top of that sony got what they want anyway and kinda look smarter for taking the weird pr hit for not taking the Microsoft deal. What a bad roll of the dice.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom