Take-Two CEO made an interesting remark about the Microsoft/Activision merger, stating that there’s only one big company that is concerned about the acquisition and future implications.
According to the Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, there’s only one big company that has concerns regarding the Microsoft/Activision merger, but, apart from that, him and most of his other competitors have no issues with the acquisition going through.
Zelnick stated that, generally speaking, he doesn’t believe that people are particularly concerned about Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision because it remains a fragmented business. Additionally, he doesn’t think that the competitive landscape will meaningfully be affected in the event that that merger goes through.
Zelnick further added that there’s one big company that does have issues with the purchase, though he refrained from mentioning its name. It’s no secret at this point that PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan has openly spoken against the acquisition, highlighting that it would negatively impact the PlayStation community.
Meanwhile, in a recent statement, Meta/Facebook defended the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft by saying that it did not believe a segmentation of the development and publishing of electronic games by platform/hardware is appropriate. It believes that Microsoft’s approach with cloud computing enabling users to stream digital games on any internet connected device will mitigate the boundaries between platforms.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company stated that the barriers to market entry are generally low in any scenario. App shop models on all platforms have led to an increase in the number of newly published digital games, as developers no longer need to organize their distribution. There are also a wide variety of APIs, SDKs and other resources offered free of charge to developers by companies such as Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., that make it easier to create new games and features.
Meta highlighted recent entries in digital game distribution, including Amazon Luna (launched in March, 2022), Netflix Games (launched in November, 2021), Google Stadia (launched in November, 2019), Apple Arcade (launched in September, 2019), and Epic Games Store (launched in December, 2018) as evidence that the barrier to market entry is low.
