Gaming IndustryFTC says I told you judge, I warned you bro, as it unloads on Microsoft for Game Pass price hikes and ‘a degraded product’ that it says break promises made to seal the Activision mergerWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Gaming IndustryFTC says I told you judge, I warned you bro, as it unloads on Microsoft for Game Pass price hikes and ‘a degraded product’ that it says break promises made to seal the Activision mergerWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Activision)
Recent updatesMicrosoft has submitted a letter to the US Ninth Circuit Court in response to the FTC’s criticisms, pointing to Game Pass Standard’s new inclusion of multiplayer functionality as making up for the loss of day-one first party game access. You can read morehere.
Recent updatesMicrosoft has submitted a letter to the US Ninth Circuit Court in response to the FTC’s criticisms, pointing to Game Pass Standard’s new inclusion of multiplayer functionality as making up for the loss of day-one first party game access. You can read morehere.
Recent updates
Microsoft has submitted a letter to the US Ninth Circuit Court in response to the FTC’s criticisms, pointing to Game Pass Standard’s new inclusion of multiplayer functionality as making up for the loss of day-one first party game access. You can read morehere.
Are you upset about the recentGame Pass price hike? Well, good news: so is the mighty American state. Or part of it, anyway. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the country’s antitrust and consumer protection watchdog, hassubmitted a filingto the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in which it attacks Microsoft for “introducing a degraded product” with its new Game Pass Standard tier.
If you’re not up to speed, Microsoft announced just over a week ago that it was overhauling its Game Pass subscription tiers across console and PC. Here’s a quick breakdown of what changed:
You don’t have to be an antitrust lawyer to realise that’s a bit of a raw deal: The whole kit and kaboodle is getting more expensive and some tiers are even losing features in the process.
The filing is just part of the FTC’s larger campaign against Microsoft’s merger withActivisionBlizzard, whichfinally closed last October. It seems remarkably unlikely—now that Activision and Microsoft are officially intertwined—that the merger will be rolled back, but the FTC’s not giving in without a fight.
In the filing, the agency notes “Microsoft’s price increases and product degradation—combined with Microsoft’s reduced investments in output and product quality via employee layoffs,” and calls them “the hallmarks of a firm exercising market power post-merger.”
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As far as the FTC is concerned, Microsoft’s decision to jack up the barriers to entry to day-one CoD for Game Pass users totally validate its doubt about that, and “thus vindicate the congressional design of preliminarily halting mergers to fully evaluate their likely competitive effects, and judicial skepticism of promises inconsistent with a firm’s economic incentives.”
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