Why Should Microsoft Acquire Activision Blizzard
It’s good for everyone except their competitors
First thing I want to talk about is simply, yes, this acquisition is good for everyone! The customers, the employees and competitions
Why? Let’s look at the customers first, shall we? Do you subscribe to Xbox Game Pass? Well, you already know why this is good. You get tons of games for a low monthly cost (not free like people keep saying on social media) and if this acquisition goes through, you can get a ton of games Day One on Game Pass, be it Console Game Pass or PC Game Pass!
Especially, if you play games like Call of Duty, which is monthly, and it can get VERY expensive over time. Just do a little calculation right now, let’s say you bought every Call of Duty game from Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Let’s also say that each game cost $60 (just for the sake of this argument)
That’s 8 games x $60, that’s $480 over 8 years. With Game Pass, in that same 8 years, you would spend $1880 for Call of Duty, Overwatch, Diablo, Starfield, Redfall, Halo, Forza Motorsport/Horizon and much more because EVERY Xbox Game Studios games come to Game Pass on Day One.
If you aren’t sure if Game Pass is for you, here’s my review on Game Pass as a service 5 years on.
Microsoft is inheriting a problem
Now a lot of people, including regulators, have seem to have forgotten that Activision Blizzard is now a cesspool of misogyny, sexual harassment and unfair labor.
Employees are forced to work long hours to release games like Call of Duty and Diablo IV, while working long hours aka crunch, the employees have to deal with a “frat boy” culture (though, this might be better now) and tons and tons of sexual harassment. It’s something you expect to see in a movie, but this is the life of multiple employees who work in an industry that they love.
When they release a successful game, developers don’t see the fruits of their labor, some of them even get ‘let go’ because they asked for a little raise after a successful release.
So why would this acquisition be good for the employees? To put it simply, Bobby Kotick, the current CEO of Activision Blizzard and the person who ignored all the problems, even though they were brought to him through multiple forms of communication, will be thrown out and Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, will assume leadership in Activision Blizzard and Microsoft has recently shown that they are willing to support unionization by not actively trying to disrupt it (that’s a very low bar, I know)
Phil Spencer has shown that he will not only listen to consumers, but he is willing to listen to developers as well and delay the release of games just so that the games can be at the best quality it can be
In terms of crunch? Well, Matt Booty has said that crunch is a thing of the past in Bethesda
So, I think we can safely check that off our “Good to acquire” list
So, is this bad for competition?
Short answer is, no!
Long answer is, well, to put it frankly, it is bad for PlayStation but that’s it. Why is it bad for PlayStation? Call of Duty is a system seller and having exclusive content for Xbox 360 was why Xbox 360 did so well and not because of the console hardware itself, RROD anyone?
And starting with the PS4 era, Sony has pushed for exclusive content for Call of Duty on their platforms and with that, PlayStation was the place to play Call of Duty, I know because I switched from Xbox to PlayStation for all my Call of Duty action and thus, PlayStation became my main console. I do have to admit that “Xbox, Turn On” was a completely turn off for me
But that’s beside the point, exclusive content in the form of exclusive missions, items or entire games will move consumers to a particular platform, regardless of what you might think.
I have known people who bought PlayStations because of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and I know people who bought Xbox because of Game Pass and Day One Exclusives so yes, Call of Duty being an exclusive is a terrible thing
Except in this case, Xbox has said several times that they are willing to offer contracts to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation and Steam, while bringing it back to Nintendo platforms because they want everyone to play Call of Duty.
Here’s two instances of Microsoft talking about keeping Call of Duty on PlayStation
This was earlier this year; this relationship has certainly soured since then and it has become so bad that Phil Spencer has gone on to say that "The Way Sony Grows Is by Making Xbox Smaller"
And with that, after Phil Spencer tweeted that Call of Duty will be staying on Steam and coming to Nintendo for the next 10 years, President of Microsoft, Brad Smith tweeted this
If you can’t tell, Microsoft’s leaderships are not happy with, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment (The parent company of PlayStation), Jim Ryan going to regulators and telling them to vote against this deal but that’s for another day. Maybe after the deal has gone through, we can talk about how this might have affected Sony’s relationship with their partners in the gaming industry
Why are people opposed to this deal?
To put it simply, exclusivity. I wrote about exclusive deals earlier in this article, but I’ll go into detail here and other reasons why people are opposed to this deal.
In terms of PlayStation, it’s all about Call of Duty and the exclusive content Sony gets from their deal with Activision.
Since it’s not easy to get actual numbers on Call of Duty sales on PlayStation, we are gonna just combine PlayStation store cut and Steam chart all-time peak and put that as our baseline, no matter how bad it is
PlayStation takes 30% of all sales (in some countries) and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2022) cost US$70, that’s US$21 per game sale.
Steam Chart shows that the all-time peak for Call of Duty MWII on Steam was 488,897
With those terrible numbers (no one should ever do this), we just have to take 488,897 and times that with US$21 and if you do that terrible calculation, you get US$10,266,837
That’s over ten million dollars in just game sales, this does not count all the cosmetics and more that’s on sale because of Warzone 2.0 and more
So you can see why Sony doesn’t want to lose customers to Xbox when it comes to Call of Duty
And then you have the regulators that, you would think would try to investigate it for monopoly and competition but in terms of CMA, you have them wondering if Sony is able to still compete without Call of Duty. It’s a fair assessment but I personally feel like they should see how it will affect the UK people
Finally, you have the FTC, they are blocking the deal because, well, no one really knows why they are blocking but some people have the theory that they are doing it to show the Biden Administration that they are willing and able to block big corporations from merging.
Essentially, they are making an example of this merger as a show of force but the problem is, they used a supposed claim from the acquisition of Bethesda in the EU as an example of Microsoft changing their stance but the EU regulators have called said that Microsoft made no such claim
Conclusion
So, what should happen? Well, I still think that the merger should be investigated but not for the reasons that CMA and FTC are blocking them for, it should be to see if Microsoft will keep to their promise
However, if Minecraft is any case of if they will, it seems like they will and I’ll explain why
The dumbest thing Microsoft could do is make Call of Duty exclusive because making it available on more platforms just means that they will get more Return on Investment, I mean they are spending $68.7B on this deal and I’m sure they want to see some of it back sometime in the decade after the deal closes.
To end this, do I think the deal will go through? Yes, I can see no reason as to why the deal should NOT go through, but I do think that there should be some concessions, like say, 10 years of Call of Duty?
