I have near zero hope we'll see any meaningful antitrust action in the future either without a complete overhaul of the incentives in politics.
Xbox div's annual revenue is $23 billion. Its big enough to be its own company and sit upper-mid pack of the F500 on its own. It'd be the number 3 or 4th top gaming company globally, beating out Nintendo even. No reason for Microsoft to not have been broken up by now, let alone have been allowed to buy all the studios they did. Don't forget they also mislead the FTC to convince them to allow the Activision/Blizzard acquisition to go forward, and then once allowed laid off 1900 employees, mostly admin/HR & support, forcing it to integrate into Microsoft gaming and operate less independently.
Edit: Keeping to SMB1 for simplicity.
Yes, but it's not the DOJ's job to tell Microsoft when they're lighting their money on fire. There's no unfair competition from this kind of thing. It wasn't any different when leather companies or old media would buy up studios and run themselves out of business.
Microsoft buying out studios could be anti-competitive, but Microsoft would have to not be Microsoft.
Firing thousands of people and closing studios reduces the overall capacity of the industry to produce diverse, competing games. Just because Microsoft is Microsoft and is incompetent doesn't mean the rest of the industry and consumers don't lose out on what those independent studios could have created on their own.
In terms of antitrust/whether the FTC should have allowed the mergers is purely predictive. Microsoft looking like idiots from it has no bearing on whether the behavior of buying them up itself is anticompetitive.
Ex: if Microsoft buys out office competitors or webmail competitors to shut them down, because those customers are going to be likely to buy more Microsoft stuff.
Buying games studios could be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to keep them alive and make their output platform exclusive (but iirc they made a commitment not to do that). It could be anticompetitive if they were going to kill them and funnel consumers into their games with continuing development... It could also be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to give these studios some uberengine secret access to Xbox/Windows that allowed them to make the best games that outside studios couldn't come close to...
But what's happened is Microsoft is killing the studios; all at once is a surprise, but death within like 3-7 years could be predicted. Most of those people will pop up again at other studios or start new studios. Some of them will realized gamedev sucks and do something else. This is the lifecycle of studios purchased by corporate overlords. When key people make enough from the purchase to allow significant but not complete creative freedom, they often make some really good games at their next venture. Too little freedom -> pump out sequels or gacha games; too much freedom -> interesting games that don't end up being much fun.
Why are the little devs selling to the big companies in the first place then? If you’re crushing it as an Indie studio why wouldn’t you stay that way knowing how big tech acts?
> "I think it's perfect for us, because we can just focus on doing our inspired weird games, and not worry about how we're going to get our next deal. We aren't chasing down our next funding and thinking about how many more months of funding we have all the time."
https://gameinformer.com/2019/06/23/tim-schafer-on-microsoft...
The only people that can tell Microsoft to gargle their gonads are already rich as fuck or have a will of steel and principles uncommon with entrepreneurs.
If a big company decides to make a game very similar to yours, they can make theirs win by throwing more money into marketing than you can. Do you want them to spend that marketing budget on your competition or on you?