are you concerned that if these companies buy these publishers they make their games exclusive? to what platform and why would that make sense?
MS got this through, because the concern from everyone was that COD could be made exclusive and the FTC tried to argue that that would be bad for competition. Like 40 countries including the UK said this deal was not anti competitive in consoles and MS has no reason to make COD exclusive as it doesnt make business sense. This deal has been scrutinized, extremely scrutinized and the only cause for concern from the UK was cloud gaming.... Which is a tiny market...like tiny...smaller than Ouya lol
The key issue I think is that a lot of people understand the value of the various pieces of the equation, but have an imperfect understanding of how they fit together, and what the final picture looks like once everything is assembled.
For example, if you look at what the "crown jewel" IP are in the ABK portfolio, they aren't all console properties. Blizzard is primarily PC and mobile, and King is almost all mobile. CoD's superficially a good focal point for argument because its a major presence on all 3 fronts, and with Sony being the biggest single beneficiary of its success outside of ABK itself, gives a natural plaintiff figure for damages incurred by the merger.
This is I assume why the FTC focussed so hard on this specifically.
The real problem though is that although "Cloud" right now isn't such a large market, in the long term it could become the dominant distribution pipeline for gaming across console, and PC, and mobile. What's primarily holding it back is the lack of "must have" content, which is the shortcoming MS are addressing with these huge IP acquisitions.
The first step is simple inclusion of big IP, to drive subscriptions that feed back to cloud pipeline. The next is price adjustment to leverage the value of accessing the IP via cloud as opposed to legacy distribution models. This need not be so obvious as jacking up prices of physical media, it can be incentivized with bonus content exclusive to service users, or discounts to add-ons purchased as part of the service.
Then of course the next step is materially leveraging consumption via the service; build in reliance on streaming tech to the product be it for basic function or simply offering visual or performance advantages over the legacy offer. Obvious example being to push Series S as the primary hardware offering whilst simultaneously populating XCloud server racks with Series X hardware.
The final step of course is simply to stop offering this "must have" content anywhere outside of the cloud pipeline. At which point there is no competition to worry about as everything is under the same roof. And the real beauty of the strategy is this is a form of dominance that extends beyond just consoles, it encompasses PC and Mobile too because its platform agnostic.
