Live in a rural area of the state. No other option currently. There is a company called Point broadband that is rumored to offer a fiber internet service around here eventually. But nothing confirmed as of yet.
We must have different sources. I’ve seen several hospital and mortgage company mergers blocked in the last couple years.
Quality and very believable article
be way better if the game was bought by the original makers of the world of warcraft and no one else. they should be their own company not held to acitivision or microsoft or anyone else.
In the case of Microsoft - courts that usually handle the suits by FTC have always been very iffy on challenges to vertical mergers. Which is different than the hospital or mortgage ones.
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Interesting, and food for thought. Thanks.
Just for an example - FTC actually lost a lawsuit against Facebook/Meta in February 2023 with their acquisition of Within Unlimited under that same vertical merger structure.
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Comcast might be able to leverage a purchase if they get $9 Billion from Disney for their Hulu stake. That is the minimum estimation of their 1/3 share. Purchasing one of the game companies would be a lot of new debt to leverage though. Take Two seems like it is the least expensive.
But the original makers of World of Warcraft started this whole thing when they originally sold the company the 1990s.
they sold it during wrath of the lichking, from what i know, and the first warcraft warcraft orcs vs humans was 1994 when it came out and warcraft 2 and 3 to wow the game was growing endlessly even up til wrath. the game has only been on decline since they sold it to activisiion meaning that the game was at its best when it had its original owners.
Nah, blizzard has never produced something under the blizzard name without being owned
they should though.
also activision has proven to ruin alot of game franchise’s over the years.
they also have a lot of successes
but in terms of blizz, they were first owned by davidson and associates, then vivendi, then activision
candycrush doesnt really count its an app game.
CoD is one of the most successful franchises ever
That is only the latest sale… In 1991, a company named Silicon and Synapse was born. In 1993, it changed its name to Chaos Studios. In 1994, it was bought by a company called Davidson & Associates. They had to change their name because someone else was using Chaos Studios. They wanted to change it to Ogre Games but Davidson & associates didn’t like that name so they chose Blizzard Entertainment. Later Davidson & Associates was purchased by Sierra Games. In 1995, Sierra Games was purchased by Vivendi International as part of Vivendi Games. In the early 2000s, Vivendi Games bought Activision and renamed the division to Activision / Blizzard after the two largest components. Then finally in 2007, Bobby Kotick got together with his billionare friends and purchased Activision / Blizzard from Vivendi just before Vivendi had major money issues.
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Also expressing interest:
The Onceler
Mr. Burns
Dr. Klaw
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of corse kotick… we all know what he allowed to fester and who he protected.
The deal did not fall through. Most of the major analysts expect the deal to succeed.
The deal only needed to succeed in 2 markets: US and EU.
That the CMA blocked the deal is only relevant in context to those other two - how it will influence the outcome in those markets. The EU ignored the CMA and passed it, and the CMA was immediately criticized by their own Prime Minister for blocking it.
The CMA ruling is being appealed, and while CMA appeals don’t go well usually, Apple and plenty of others have had successful appeals. Things on Microsoft’s side against the CMA:
- Disney + Fox merger was approved with many simulateries and created a similar cloud streaming content aggregation
- Major conflict of interest - the chief person in charge of the CMA decision was formerly a lawyer from the firm currently representing Sony
- Major failure of market calculations - CMA’s concern was entirely about cloud gaming, and in their calculation they considered every game pass sub a cloud gaming user, which is clearly very far from the truth
- Major failure in market calculations - CMA did not note multiple cloud streaming agreements Microsoft had penned with other cloud providers to allow all Acti/Blizz games on those cloud providers
- Major failure in mitigation - CMA did not cite cloud gaming as a concern for Microsoft to offer remediations, the focus of their request for remediation was CoD availability
So, the appeal case is pretty strong. But again, they don’t need to win the CMA, only the US and the EU, and they already won the EU.
So what about the US? Well - if the FTC does not get an injunction, the deal will pass even without FTC approval. The FTC has made no steps towards injunction.
The FTC is taking Microsoft to court for a vertical merger, and the FTC almost never wins cases against vertical mergers. In aggravation (meaning, working against the odds of the FTC) is the fact that the FTC offered no hearing and no request for remediation / concession with Microsoft to mitigate or accommodate the deal with remedies. When the case goes to trial and every nation in the world (except UK) has approved the deal, and no remedy was even requested, the FTC is straight up going to get smashed by the courts for not holding remedy hearings.
Microsoft is buying Activision. Period. The only thing slowing it down is Khan’s political ambitions.