Microsoft suddenly announced in January 2022 that they planned to acquire Activision Blizzard, the publisher of the “Decisive Moment” and “Diablo” series, at a sky-high price of nearly US$69 billion. Seeing its success, regulators around the world still have to come forward to judge whether this acquisition constitutes a “monopoly” that affects market competition. Recently, the Federal Trade Commission (Federal Trade Commission) from the United States formally confronted Microsoft for this, and launched a series of hearings in the past few days.
The main purpose of the Federal Trade Commission at this stage is to hope that the court can issue an injunction to delay Microsoft’s completion of the acquisition until they can start a major trial in August this year to determine whether the Activision Blizzard acquisition violated antitrust laws. trial.
In addition, through the public court documents and the testimonies of related parties, in recent years, many unknown secrets behind the game industry have also begun to be revealed to the world. For example, future Bethesda games may still be released. On the PlayStation platform, or the current state of “The Elder Scrolls 6”, and Microsoft’s attempts to acquire SEGA, Bungie, Square Enix and other well-known game publishers, or Sony’s claim that Microsoft tried to spend a lot of money to completely end their game business, etc. Even the production costs of two PlayStation exclusives, The Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon 2, were accidentally exposed. And a few days ago, even Nintendo began to be involved in this legal conflict, allowing players to see another hint related to the successor of the Nintendo Switch.
Since the acquisition of Activision Blizzard started to spark the topic, the change in the distribution method of the “Decisive Moment” series has become one of the biggest points of the opposition. To prevent this popular shooting game masterpiece from becoming an Xbox exclusive is Sony’s strong opposition to this. The core reason for the acquisition, in this regard, Microsoft has been emphasizing that even after the acquisition is successfully completed, they will still let this series appear on other platforms, and even signed a ten-year contract with Nintendo and other manufacturers. Promised to put “Decisive Moment” on their platform.
However, since the performance of the Nintendo Switch console is significantly behind that of the PlayStation and Xbox consoles, opposition parties such as the FTC and Sony have questioned such a commitment. However, in an email conversation that was officially made public in court recently, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick and Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa discussed how to put the game on the planned Switch successor. The most interesting information is that Kotick hinted that this undisclosed new Nintendo machine will have performance close to the “eighth generation” game console, that is, PS4/PS4 Pro and Xbox One/Xbox One X.
“Given the tighter coherence of the eighth-generation console, and the games we offer on PS4 and Xbox One consoles, it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll be able to bring more complete content to the next-gen Switch as well. says Bobby Kotick
According to related reports, Bobby Kotick also expressed his regret at this hearing for not letting the “Decisive Moment” series be on the Switch platform. After all, this host did bring quite amazing sales performance in the end. But it is worth noting that the Activision executive still emphasized that they have not yet obtained the exact specification information of the Switch successor model, but just after they have the relevant information, it is very likely that they will start preparing for future “Decisive Moment” games. Move onto the platform.
“I really think there’s a good chance we’ll be doing a Call of Duty game for the new Nintendo console. I can’t say exactly what’s planned just yet, but what I can say is that it’s definitely something we’re considering. When we have the details of the console’s specs, we’ll start digging deeper, but we don’t have that information yet. We’ve missed an entire generation of Switch consoles, but we still have to wait for the exact specs, so we’re still at this stage. There aren’t any plans for that,” Kotick said.
