By Nelson Schneider - 07/21/24 at 02:09 PM CT
My all-time favorite President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, earned a reputation as a Trust Buster, regulating the Wild West of Big Business into a more manageable and publicly responsible form. It seems that today’s Federal Trade Commission has finally opened its eyes and gotten back to turn of the (20th) Century priorities in that it recently attacked Microsoft for increasing the price of Gamepass and removing some features from all but the most expensive subscription tier.
Where was the FTC when Microsoft was purchasing company after company? Why did the FTC allow the Activision-Blizzard-King deal to go through if they knew Microsoft would raise prices as they consolidated control and increased the Xbox Division’s market cap by billions of dollars?
They probably had their heads up their collective asses like all appointees from both the Trump and Biden administrations, worrying about pushing their side of the Culture War instead of neutrally and objectively DOING THEIR JOBS. But now, in what is likely to be the twilight of the Biden Administration, the FTC awoke with a snort and a jerk to realize that the bad dream they were having about Microsoft buying one third of America’s videogame publishing might actually happened and was maaaaybe a not-so-great idea.
As far as I’m concerned, Microsoft and the entirety of the Xbox Division need to part ways. Period. Microsoft is a business software and operating system company that has long tried – and failed – to break into other markets. The Xbox Division is now so bloated and overtuned that it really needs to be set free to stand (or fall) on its own. Microsoft has given Xbox an enormous financial head start, but having two enormous-yet-completely-different companies under one roof – and one tax return – makes no sense anymore.
When Xbox was a side project like Zune or Bing, it was acceptable for the parent company to keep it as an experiment or write-off. It is no longer a small and insignificant side project, but is a massive conglomerate monstrosity that has the power to shape the future of Industrial Videogaming, and the direction it wants to take us is not the direction most of us want to go. Yet, as long as Xbox is grafted to the perpetual cash-infusions from Microsoft and the parent company’s successful stranglehold on corporate tech infrastructure, Xbox can never truly fail, as even with decades of net losses, it STILL exists and STILL has billions of dollars in new investments and acquisitions thrown at it.
We need someone at the FTC to grow a pair of Teddy Roosevelt-sized balls and swing that Trust Busting stick, severing Microsoft and Xbox in one swift motion. Then we’ll finally get to see, once and for all, if Xbox even deserves to still be a thing.
