The FTC Gets Steamrolled Again, Can’t Pause The Microsoft Activision Deal Before Appeal

I feel like a Microsoft shill, since the fediverse (and Reddit before this) feels so much of one mind and I am not. I know consolidation is generally bad for the consumer, while competition is generally good, but is the Activision deal bad for the consumer or the industry?

ABK doesn’t have a steady output, doesn’t have reliable IPs and doesn’t produce guaranteed hits. What they have is some cash and some overvalued IP from the past (aka “assets”). Let’s look at this one by one:

We are in the “Blizzard can do no wrong”-part of the eternal Blizzard-is-trash-cycle, since Diablo 4 is generally well received at the moment. But their last two games have been Overwatch 2 and Diablo Immortal. Before that Overwatch in 2016, which - while liked by many - didn’t really catch up to other hero shooters popularity-wise (even though the IP stayed in the zeitgeist for other, unmonetarized reasons). So what is Blizzard living off of? WoW, obviously, which had that much decline due to their decisions, they needed to relaunch their old game again to retain players and WoW is still shrinking (though more slowly than before). Their last memorable IPs are the Starcraft and Warcraft RTS, which did not translate into the current landscape very well. RTS have always been niche as a consumer product, but considerably less so in the times of Age of Empires and Command & Conquer. Their biggest appeal has been in eSports where they have been leapfrogged heavily by LoL and - adding insult to injury - DotA. It looks like Diablo 4 will be a venerable hit, which is great (I personally like Diablo), but it needs to replace a lot of revenue lost from other revenue streams alone.

Activision is the CoD machine it looks to be: They drove all their original IP into the ground or simply fell out of the zeitgeist, like Tony Hawk’s, Guitar Hero, Spyro, and Crash (I know, the last two hurt, but they simply couldn’t acquire a new and younger audience like Mario, Zelda and even Sonic could). Movie adaptations, which have been most of the output Activision had in the 2000’s have fallen out of style heavily and movie adjacent IP like PlayStation’s Spider-Man aren’t developed nor published by Activision anymore. Which essentially leaves CoD. Modern Warfare 2 2022 is comparably successful again but Vanguard was such a shitshow it single handedly tanked Activision’s revenue for the 2022 fiscal year. Activision simply cannot continue to pump these things out yearly and expect a steady return each year, which is nice, don’t get me wrong, but is a problem for Activision’s bottom line.

One of the largest contributors of ABK is the dreaded King, which paradoxically struggles from all the same problems as Blizzard and Activision Even though a lot younger. They have one IP bringing in all the money, which is shrinking in player count and revenue contribution: Candy Crush. If boomers start to die en masse, or another Candy Crush is able to capture the “mindless smartphone puzzle market”, King is effectively over.

In this situation ABK makes a little bit more revenue than Take2 (their most comparable competition), with more than double Take2’s employees. While EA makes close to the same revenue, still with less employees and with more “hot irons” in the fire (love or hate EA, but they have Sims, FIFA, Madden, Apex and make decently well received single player games like Jedi and Dead Space on the side regularly, while not really being propped up by a mobile division as massive as King).

I’m not saying ABK cannot compete or is already bankrupt, but their pipeline dried up and they’d need a lot of restructuring (read: fire thousands of people), to justify their revenue and output. Additionally they’d need to diversify and get more IPs back on track or even create new ones (preposterous idea, I know!), to get back to acceptable risk levels.

Microsoft is in a comparable situation currently (let’s wait on Starfield for final judgement of Microsoft’s “situation”): They drove a lot of IP into the ground and didn’t replace it with new one, while losing a console war at the same time (I dispise Don Mattrick’s decisions as much as everyone else and I like Phil Spencer’s public persona a lot, but Phil wasn’t able to turn the tide until now, so I’m not aware that he is a better manager of Xbox’s course than Don). They are not trying to buy ABK the publisher, they are buying CoD to replace Halo specifically and they will bring in Blizzard’s IP into their group of “double A” developers like obsidian, where it fits right in (and some mobile footing doesn’t hurt nobody) and Microsoft needs to pay for Activision’s cash and “assets”, which makes this deal look so big, even though I’d argue it’s not really that big.

I don’t see this as consolidation, really. I think there are two path’s forward: either Microsoft buys Activision, gets rid of a lot of employees, which will be disliked by everybody. Then giving Blizzard the creative leeway they need to produce games for GamePass (probably with smaller budgets and shorter development time like Obsidian). And getting CoD back on track as the live service game it should have been. Or Microsoft doesn’t buy Activision and Bobby Kottick being the visionless uncreative manager he currently is, gets rid of a lot of employees, does put more pressure on Blizzard to create the next WoW (which they can’t), puts more pressure on those poor CoD-farms like Sledgehammer and Raven to produce more CoDs faster. Then the decline won’t be as visible for a few years (due to less payroll) until it becomes visible again since nothing relevant changed and Bobby sells off King for cash and after a few years the rest of Activision gets sold off one by one. I fail to see how this scenario is better than the Microsoft acquisition.

Video games aren’t essential goods and services or commodities. The consumer doesn’t profit from competition as much, if all the competition are bad and run down video game IPs. Creative works are not really substitutable. One liter of clean water from one company is the same as a liter from another. But 100 bad games you play for 1 hour each is not the same as one good game you play for 100 hours. The consumer profits, if there is a climate allowing for creative freedom and the nurturing of existing and new IP, instead. And this climate does not exist at ABK at the moment, while I see a chance it could exist at Microsoft.

The FTC was dumb. It presented its case as if it is a lawyer for Sony, not as a public organization defending consumer's rights. That's why it failed.

I mean at the end of the day hes a CEO. He knows his audience, though.