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owsf2000I suppose I can sum up my feelings on the topic pretty simply. There's no way a billion dollar company merging/swallowing another "smaller" billion dollar company will have no negative impact on the industry as a whole.
The more concessions you're willing to accept, and especially the ones you offer yourself to get the merger to happen, shows the more likelihood you're fully aware of the damage you're going to be doing to the rest of the industry (ie: your competition). And of course it's very safe to say that the ultimate payoff will always exceed in spades whatever cost you'll suffer from the limited time concessions.
Take into account just one concession Microsoft has offered. They promise, if the merger goes through, that they will make sure Call of Duty is available on the Playstation for the next 10 years (or was it for the lifetime of sony's current machine, the PS5?) What does that really amount to? A handful of games over the next 10 years. After that, once the merger has been cemented and there's no longer any way to rationally separate the two again, ALL of the negative effects of the merger can happen in full force. The promise is basically another way of saying "Heeeey, no problem. Let us have this really big thing and we won't deliberately try to bankrupt the competition for a good 5-10 years... but after that shit gonna be real."
Really, any concession that's time based should immediately be thrown out as no concession at all. It's just kicking the concerns further down the road until it's impossible to fix the damage.
In short, mergers of billion dollar companies really shouldn't be happening imo.
The more concessions you're willing to accept, and especially the ones you offer yourself to get the merger to happen, shows the more likelihood you're fully aware of the damage you're going to be doing to the rest of the industry (ie: your competition). And of course it's very safe to say that the ultimate payoff will always exceed in spades whatever cost you'll suffer from the limited time concessions.
Take into account just one concession Microsoft has offered. They promise, if the merger goes through, that they will make sure Call of Duty is available on the Playstation for the next 10 years (or was it for the lifetime of sony's current machine, the PS5?) What does that really amount to? A handful of games over the next 10 years. After that, once the merger has been cemented and there's no longer any way to rationally separate the two again, ALL of the negative effects of the merger can happen in full force. The promise is basically another way of saying "Heeeey, no problem. Let us have this really big thing and we won't deliberately try to bankrupt the competition for a good 5-10 years... but after that shit gonna be real."
Really, any concession that's time based should immediately be thrown out as no concession at all. It's just kicking the concerns further down the road until it's impossible to fix the damage.
In short, mergers of billion dollar companies really shouldn't be happening imo.
