Microsoft and Sony sign deal to keep Activision’s Call of Duty on PlayStation

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 180 points – Microsoft and Sony sign deal to keep Activision's Call of Duty on PlayStation
cnbc.com

Microsoft and Sony sign deal to keep Activision’s Call of Duty on PlayStation::Microsoft and Sony have signed an agreement to keep Activision's best-selling Call of Duty series available on PlayStation, after the conclusion of the deal.

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Likely the same thing that has happened to every other industry.

  • Someone comes out with a disruptive low cost subscription model, consumers like it because it's so low cost and anything that isn't on it they can still buy.
  • People buy less, content producers have to move to the same subscription model to survive.
  • The low cost of the subscription model can't pay for all the content that is normally made by that industry, creatives can't find backing to create content anymore, creative struggle to get paid between there being less money and corporate greed snatching what is left
  • Quality drops, output drops, no one is happy.

Sounds like Game Pass to me

It does and that's the real issue.

MS has the power, reach and financial means to completely steamroll the market by underpricing games pass to kill any competition. Then once they've done that they can set prices, control labour and production to reduce costs too and monopolise the market to their shareholders cold dead money grubbing hearts content.

To put the scale of the issue in perspective.

Microsoft has a market cap of 2.5 Trillion dollars. Or 2500 billion.

Sony, Nintendo, Tencent, Valve, EA, Take Two and Ubisoft combined don't even reach 700 billion. We take Tencent out of the equation and it's only 300 billion.

So we're talking 4x that of all their combined global competition. If we only look at "western" companies its basically 8.5x.

But getting rid of Bobby Kotick will make gaming better /s

Indeed. At first, I cheered for them because I wanted a better Blizzard and saw it as an opportunity to get rid of Kotick exactly as you say. But the more it drags on and the more I read/hear about context... the more I wish it fell through.

And yet the notion of taking a step back and dusting off the old system is actively rebelled against by consumers because they'd rather have convenient shit than quality if it means having to pay for it.

The low cost of the subscription model can't pay for all the content that is normally made by that industry

This is where economies of scale comes in though, especially in tech where you're offering an ephemeral product. Even at say US$10 if you get a million subscribers (not too hard to do, netflix had many times that number at their peak) that's US$10 million dollars. Which you would think should be more than enough to punch out a bunch of relatively low budget productions, pay your neccessaries and still leave you a good chunk of change I feel.

You can feel that way but you'd be wrong. Game development costs are enormous these days, 40million has become the norm, quality games that make sales and gain subscribers cost north of 100 million by themselves, not factoring in marketing costs.