The battle over the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft has shed light on the fact that antitrust regulators are woefully unprepared to regulate the gaming industry.
Steam is changing its refund policy, but you probably won’t be affected
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A job listing published by the UK studio reveals that its next project will be another entirely new IP.
Good. Something not boring, not one of those "make your own game" crap and also on Steam would be nice.
Outriders developer People Can Fly's next game has been canceled after its publishing agreement with Take-Two Interactive fell through.
"the capital group of PCF Group S.A."
If you're getting funding from a group that needs two different ways of Acronyming itself, things will not go the way you want them to.
Outriders was crap. They slapped that game together and threw in a loot system to get players' attention. This game was absolutely jank and the always online nonsense made it stutter like crazy. People Can't Optimize.
I liked Outriders but I could see where the artistic vision was compromised. The way the industry is now, it wouldn't surprise me that upper management would scrap something that didn't pull in money via gaas, mts, or other means.
its also the fact that all these regulators are all somewat old and just have no idea about gaming.
and it will continue to be this way unfortunately.
If Sony had the money to acquire Activision Blizzard they wouldn't be allowed to own them, because they basically have a Monopoly in the console market.
With Microsoft, they're in 3rd place which gives them more powers to be allowed to acquire publishers.
Microsoft still doesn't have a Monopoly in the gaming sector. Hopefully, they acquire Sega next...
The CMA actually demonstrated an excellent level of knowledge of the so called "gaming industry ". The problem in general is regulatory capture of these regulators and/or judiciary preventing them from feeling empowered to say no and leave it at that. There has to be a shift in regulations that prevents these tech conglomerates from mindlessly gobbling up industries apart from exceptional circumstances which offer no real percievable value to the market and or consumers. ABK was doing just fine without Microsoft buying them. The agreement for sale was done to enrich the executives at ABK and to fullfill Microsoft irrational desire to control and dominate every market they are in.
They have taken the gaming industry seriously as is their job and they did have experts to fall back on and get advice from. The only part of this that's an absolute fucking joke is that anyone can seriously keep a straight face and make out this deal should have gone through. That they buy any of MS's bullshit. They a judge who had full access to all the info we saw presented, the testimonies we all had access to and a load of documents that came through afterwards literally admitting Microsoft was trying to use its position as a Trillion Dollar Company to buy a market it had utterly failed in repeatedly through sales, innovation and ip creation and helping said industry to grow by creating new studios and helping smaller ones to grow- instead taking a shortcut and buying the largest publisher in order to make most of its future gsmes exclusive to their service and console and she still turned round and said "I see no problem here". The judge also belittled the industry with some of ther comments. The only person not taking the games industry seriously was that judge ruling on the injunction. Who was supposed to be ruling on if the ftc could bring a case against them NOT if it was anticompetitive.
That said the way they made some of their arguments against the acquisition was flawed and the cma should have stuck with its original decision. They backtracked in February over the console market because of data Microsoft provided which when you look at the methodology behind it, it's clear is cherry picked and biased in the way its been collected. That they would accept such data at face value it seems is embarrassing.