Report: Google & Nvidia The Latest Companies To 'Express Concerns' Over Xbox ActiBlizz Deal

Just for giggles I thought, forget ABK, and go for Nvidia in stead , but damn, Nvidia has a market cap of over 400 billion , wth, that's a crazy value.... Intel and Amd combined is just north of half of that.....

id suspect there are more objections out there we dont know about.

MS will have factored it all. it was never going to sail through unopposed.

the Zenimax deal was scrutinized, obviously one 10x more will be scrutinized harder

nVidia who 'dominates' the PC GPU space and Google who dominates the Internet...

No one asked their opinion on the acquisition. Stay in your lane children. The acquisition is going through. Lol.

I had concerns with Google Stadia from the beginning and I was not wrong (like many others). Google failed in cloud-gaming so are they seeing MS is going to succeed? + AMD technology is used in the console space by PS & XB over Nvidia/Intel and is the "next" Switch leaving Intel behind? (AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling technology)

Titan companies complaining about titan companies.

Sony complaining that MS is going to beat them at their own exclusive games strategy. nVidia complaining because their cloud offering is competitive but not as popular as xCloud, and Google complaining because they failed badly in the gaming market. If it was Google, nVidia, or Sony buying Activision-Blizzard there would be no issue.

@NeoRatt of course there would be issues.

drop the fanboy nonsense. hypothetically if Sony had the cash, they would never get ABK.

All mergers get opposition, doesnt mean it wont go through

This the same Nvidia who charges $1200 for a video card?

Nvidia, the hardware vendor for Nintendo Switch has a complaint now.... Though Ironically they stand to benefit from the CoD contract with Nintendo so I'm not sure why they're actually interfering unless Nintendo is dropping them for Switch 2. Otherwise their only complaint is in cloud gaming, which is a weird complaint in that they don't currently have any ABK games in their own catalogue because.......ABK doesn't believe in subscriptions..... So their entire issue then is that a competitor could gain something to add to the market (subscription ABK games) that currently doesn't exist. Their argument is just strange here, they stand to lose nothing, they just don't want a competitor to gain strength. That's pretty much everything wrong with business law in a nutshell, it's just a another tool for companies to gain advantages rather than about any kind of legal issues.

I still don't know what Google's complaint actually is. They're not in the streaming market because they failed to be competitive even without MS buying ABK. Even if they do plan on re-entering, and I'm sure they do, their hurdle isn't a stronger competitor in MS, it's overcoming the reasons that made them fail last time while EVERY competitor is in a stronger position than before including Sony. And if there's any company on Earth that should be the very last one to talk about monopolies it's a tie between Google and Amazon. Do they really want to open up that box? Pandora would be displeased (or did they buy them and shut them down, I can't remember.)

Stadia kind of works against any argument that says that MS would prevent the success of other streaming platforms if they buy ABK, as a case example that other streaming platforms weren't competitive without ABK either.

If these companies are all against the concept of entertainment industry exclusivity and regulated uniform access to all content, I'm 100% behind that. But FTC vs MS doesn't address that, it'll need some congressional level inquisition/presidential level incitement of the mob, and we'll have to dismantle Netflix, Disney +, Hulu, Amazon Video, Playstation, Nintendo, and all their entire business models. I can't stand all the exclusivity stuff, but I also can't wait for $125 games in a government regulated content-license marketplace......

@SplooshDmg The bride is Godzilla fused with Frankenstein's monster, and Bobby's portrait is taped to its forehead like a mutilated grotesque final boss in a Fromsoft game. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but some faces can simply not be loved and mostly force you to look away

@Pusher2021 switch uses Nvidia not intel intel has neverr had console parts as far as i can remeber switch is using a modified Nvidia chip thats old as hell, i mean it was old when the switch came out....it uses a Nvida Tegra 1 custom chip... when it came out the Tegra 2 was already out and was way more powerful...and now they are up to what the Tegra K2 or is it x2 idk so many variants now.. point is its a nvidia part thats from 2008 and was for the switch to make it do that stuff better.

@Blessed_Koz To be fair to Switch Tegra 1 was still the current consumer chip at the time. The Tegra 2 was an expensive as heck chip with low yield specifically intended for the automotive industry and sky's the limit pricing.

@SplooshDmg In fairness to Ubisoft, they're one of the pioneers that spearheaded every game having to be huge to begin with! I feel like the whole industry was mismanaged by "visionaries" that had no idea what they were doing, drove the industry into the ground, and now have no idea how to fix it other than selling 100% of the industry to the 6 biggest oligarchies worldwide to figure out what to do with it by shoveling unlimited money at it. Remember when id made a handful of games that sold "tens of thousands of copies" from a shareware CD for like $15, and every employee got a Lamborghini at a little garage shop in Dallas? How did we go from that to this? Then again those Lambos made them need to sell to Zenimax who needed to sell to MS.... Which goes back to the circular argument.

It may be a money printing powerhouse, but "this will make too much money" is a different argument from "this prevents competition." This is such a weird thing because the only argument anyone ever seems to make AGAINST it is a dislike of super rich companies buying other super rich companies to become richer super rich companies. Which I totally get. Even agree with. But....this does nothing about that, and every avenue to even consider doing something about that gets roundly rejected instantly. The public complaints about this just make no sense because it doesn't even affect the thing they have a problem with, and the corporate complaints about it are self-serving complaints designed mostly around using competition law as a tool to hamstring competition.

@Blessed_Koz The slash Intel was referring to some older rumor that both could be working together for a "new" Switch APU (combo CPU & GPU) (what AMD has done on its own IIRC)

If the FTC was to use this, it would only complicate the market that the FTC was trying to establish as being impacted. They already made the desperate attempt to exclude nintendo and PC from the affected market of "high end home consoles" or whatever they called it.

It would be hilarious to watch the FTC take its hard stance on Big Tech by protecting Google's interests but I don't think the FTC will use this in their case.

@SplooshDmg Ubi was one of the originators of the "Call of Duty Lifecycle" of annual releases with AC, which then ruined the series, burned it out, then they rebooted it with the "bigger every several years = better" mentality. They're the ones that stated the future of AAA was a few huge games per company. AC was intended to be their CoD. And in many ways it really is. And just like Activision the company exists purely to support the golden goose now. I wouldn't say they failed, I'd say they succeeded and it ruined them.

I think the problem with Fortnite/Minecraft huge as a concept is quite literally that nobody has successfully done that on purpose, ever. Fortnite was nothing but a side product to demo engine tech and for reasons beyond anyone's comprehension became this tween pop culture sensation. Similar with minecraft it was an ugly, silly, indie lego game that somehow became a kids icon #1 toy. Any company TRYING to create such a thing will fail. It's like that youtuber that becomes a celebrity. It just accidentally happens once every 10-20 years from some random low-budget thing devastating every billion dollar R&D project.

Apex is very literally the low budget generic arena shooter version of Titanfall, the actual well designed game. It's not even that different, it's just a worse, more generic version of the same thing made more cheaply. The real trick to success at that Fall Guys and Apex level success is to just churn out fast turnaround low budget, low cost, low fun garbageware and hope stoned kids think it's the best thing ever. Ubisoft does that more than anyone, LOL! But they just didn't get lucky yet because they actually try to make games out of them and the stoned kids just want Face Time with guns. They're not huge because they're the best games. They're huge because they're a modern replacement for the mall and a telephone and you can shoot the person on the other end of the phone, which really....it's easy to see why that's popular and I'm still waiting for the Halo: Call Center Edition. Phones but with guns is exactly what we need for dealing with CSRs.

The reality is these companies have to stop chasing a market that is not their market, and investing based on the assumption it can become their market. The "next breakout hit" does not emerge form their market. It's not created from within their market. It's not actually sold to their market. It is a product made by a different industry and sold to a different market, and its emergence is random, at that. If this industry focused on THEIR ACTUAL MARKET rather than trying to spend more to break into some other market for which an actual strategy to hit success in that market does not actually exist, they would budget a LOT more responsibly and actually see success they're looking for. People microwaving their phones on Youtube have far more views than Top Gun Maverick ever will and the whole production took no more than $1200 and 45 seconds on defrost to make. Gaming companies failing to understand who their market is is the problem and nothing else. Quality doesn't sell the big numbers. Stupid things that make no sense to be popular do, purely because popularity begets more popularity. The Kardashians are semi-sentient models of this example.

I have to say I still don't get the appeal of Genshin though. It's just mindless grinding. It appeals to some part of some people's primitive reptile brain that needs checklist scheduling for stimulation. The kind of people that "log in to check the dailies" on a game. In my day we called that a TPS report.

@SplooshDmg The industry already went through it's reckoning with "trying to get CoD money" in the 00's. Half the industry was in the red as a result and most of the Japanese majors nearly collapsed entirely as a result. You would think they'd have learned they're not going to get CoD money because you just can't manufacture that kind of popular sensation, but, no, then Fortnite happened and they all tried to do it AGAIN.

The big theme though is with all these big hits, none of them were manufactured to become hits. They just....did. Ubi's business should not be shaky if they were not budgeting with the expectation of a lucky strike.

"There is a lot of grinding, but it's an online game, that comes with the territory. "

This comes back to why I just do not like online games. It's designed simply to waste your time doing menial tasks. I bought another 2 months of FF14 MMO just to give it one more try. I tried it for like 5 hours and I simply can not stand it at all. The UI is IMPOSSIBLE , navigation is a mess, And the gameplay is useless fetch quests and doing battle with monsters with the absolutely most boring possible mechanics of doing nothing but pushing buttons on a cooldown timer, endlessly. How is this popular?! I don't get it.

O gawd that description of Genshin is just....everything wrong. I truly do not get the love people have for these MMO-type activities that literally do nothing but waste large amounts of time doing menial tasks. And the fact that this seems to be the most popular thing on the planet (not just Genshin but general gaming)....I literally just do not understand the human psyche at all anymore. It's like the entire species just broke.

I get that time is a major limiter....but I just....you're the guy that washes your disposable food items to save a half a buck.....HOW ARE YOU BUYING COSMETIC DLC?!?!

Personally, I'd much rather have a scrooge mcduck sized money bin full of amazing games I'd love to play someday if I ever get the time than just throw money in the toilet for the quick gratification of blue cape instead of red cape in some online game I do menial tasks in because it's something rather than chipping away at something that actually feels rewarding!

I mean I'm a pretty OCD person, but I really (really!) don't understand the modern gaming world that seems to be MOST of the gaming world that's into ultra extreme OCD tasklisting as the primary draw. OCD as I am, I will never, ever understand it. I also need to progress, though. No progression, no fun. So just grinding at things for the sake of doing them isn't really fun to me.

Wait.....didn't you JUST buy a PS5? And of course you won't find time to play it because you're freaking grinding in an infinite unending game of menial tasks designed to keep you trapped in it

Well how will poor little Google and Nvidia survive? I mean they are just such small companies with such limited resources, they would be wiped out if this went through! The FTC really needs to do what they can for them.

Nvidia, I can understand their input. Google, they can keep their opinion to themselves.

@SplooshDmg What does the "online" aspect really add? The point of "online games" ins interacting with humans. If you're not interacting with humans it's little more than a surveillance service at which point the question becomes "why is it online?"

I love how you've gone full circle from being multiplat. To All-in on Xbox. To dropping Xbox and going all-in on PC Master Race, to going multiplat again, to basically just playing mobile games on your phone.

@SplooshDmg LOL the one online game I'm addicted to you bounced off. What turned you off it?

Somehow you've played more games than I have while also being an mtx-mmo-gaas prisoner. That's impressive!

@NEStalgia "ABK doesn't believe in subscriptions"

Well good thing is that GeForce Now isn't really a subscription service. But GeForce Now did have ABK games at one point, but those was pulled along with every other major publisher game when GeForce Now existed beta, and they started charging monthly... But Nvidia have been spending the last 2-3 years convincing publishers to return.

ABK has been absent most likely due to them more or less also pulling their major releases from Steam and releasing only on battle.net which isnt supported by GeForce Now. But with their big return to steam last years. Nvidia probably feels that they could convince them to return to GeForce Now, but Xbox buying them is putting a damper on that.

MS should purchase WB studios while we wait for the FTC to stop wasting our tax dollars. Maybe Remedy and RGG while they writing checks 🤣

@Floki I always forget it's not subscription anymore it's just a virtual machine rental. Weird service really. I keep thinking of it how it originally worked which was like GP.

Still the same issue though, where Activision isn't participating, so the buyout doesn't actually change anything for Nvidia regardless of what they think they could get. If it's about that they're probably just looking not to block it but to blackmail a deal to get ms to commit to give them what abk won't.