After months of uncertainty, the United States Federal Trade Commission has officially filed a lawsuit to stop Microsoft from its $68.7 billion dollar purchase of Activision Blizzard. The attempt to block the acquisition is because the FTC believes that it would allow Microsoft to suppress competitors, especially due to the fact that Microsoft already acquired ZeniMax and made their IPs exclusive to Microsoft platforms despite stating to antitrust authorities that they would not do that.

The Federal Trade Commission is seeking to block technology giant Microsoft Corp. from acquiring leading video game developer Activision Blizzard, Inc. and its blockbuster gaming franchises such as Call of Duty, alleging that the $69 billion deal, Microsoft’s largest ever and the largest ever in the video gaming industry, would enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business.

Microsoft says that it is prepared to take things to court and prove that its purchase of Activision will help competition rather than hurt it. They also made offers to Valve, Nintendo, and Sony that would allow for Activision's Call of Duty franchise to be available on competing platforms for up to 10 years.

Source

 

[pedro702]

Maybe you should read the post again before responding - y’know, just in case you wanted to have a good rebuttal. Acquiring Sony/Nintendo for the purposes of killing off their competing systems *would* reduce consumer choice and *would* be monopolistic. Buying a developer does not have the same effect, for reasons I’ve explained above.

so buying every developer not owned by sony or nintendo would not be a monopoly? ...

 

[Foxi4]

so buying every developer not owned by sony or nintendo would not be a monopoly? ...

They’re not buying every developer, are they? “But what if they do?” is not a legitimate argument.

 

[Jayro]

Good, I'm tired of Microsoft buying up everything I love. Skype. Minecraft. Zenimax (DOOM). Almost got Yahoo!, Inc too. I woulda been hella pissed if that one had gone through. I signed up with Yahoo! Mail in 1998, because I didn't want Microsoft all up in my biz (Hotmail).
They must be stopped.

They’re not buying every developer, are they? “But what if they do?” is not a legitimate argument.

They're buying up too many umbrella companies, and becoming too powerful as a result. They're just as bad as Disney at this point.

 

[Foxi4]

They're buying up too many umbrella companies, and becoming too powerful as a result. They're just as bad as Disney at this point.

That doesn’t make them a monopoly. The FTC simply has a hard-on for Microsoft, always have - we’ve been through this in the 90’s when the government insisted that including Internet Explorer in Windows as a built-in default browser, as opposed to leaving that functionality separate, somehow inhibited the ability of third-parties (like Netscape) to sell their browsers, and was thus “monopolistic”. Nowadays if you shipped an OS without a web browser, you’d be laughed out of the room. IE never stopped Opera, Mozilla or Google - in fact, Google was especially successful, with Chrome becoming the de facto “new default” for most users. The FTC can simply smell blood in the water, and they’re all too keen to pursue since Microsoft is an American corporation, and thus easy to drag from one court to the next.

 

[Dark_Ansem]

They're just as bad as Disney at this point.

So, still better than Games Workshop and Nintendo?