During a recent earnings call, Take-Two's CEO and chairman, Strauss Zelnick, discussed the company's current state of affairs, including selling off Private Division, its high-end indie publishing label, and how he thinks the upcoming Trump presidency will affect business.
“I believe in the democratic process. By all accounts, this was a free, fair, and secure election,” Zelnick says (via Variety). “We’re an entertainment company, not a politics company. We’re focused on our mission.
"I think that the President-elect has made it very plain that he believes in reducing regulation. I do believe that the FTC was misguided during President Biden’s term, and I do think that the FTC tried to impede some transactions that were beneficial for both the companies in question and the economy at large, and the FTC lost all those cases since. So I do think that, depending on what the specific topic is, deregulation can be a positive, and I am certainly looking forward to a more sensible FTC.”
From the beginning, the FTC was a big roadblock in Microsoft's bid to buy Activision Blizzard. At first, it planned to sue Microsoft in order to stop the deal from going through, as it said that the company's treatment of Bethesda games demonstrated that it "can and will withhold content from rival platforms." The biggest sticking point was whether Microsoft planned to make the Call of Duty series exclusive: "With control over Activision's blockbuster franchises, Microsoft would have both the means and motive to harm competition by manipulating Activision's pricing, [as well as] degrading Activision's game quality or player experience on rival consoles."
Another issue that the FTC tried to warn courts about was the potential that the acquisition of Activision Blizzard could mean a hike in Game Pass prices. Something that was made a reality after Microsoft announced that the PC Game Pass would get a $2 price increase and Game Pass Ultimate changed from $16.99 to $19.99/month.
I do believe that for Take-Two and other large corporations, deregulation is a positive, but that's not the case for consumers. Yes, the FTC spent the better half of the last two years breathing down Microsoft's neck only for the deal to go ahead anyway, but I'd much rather see some attempt, no matter how successful, to put the consumer first over profit. But I'm not the CEO of a billion-dollar company, so maybe my priorities are a little different.
