![]() ![]() The US’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued to block the merger last December, but US antitrust law says the decision on whether the merger will go through is made by a court, not the agency. After the UK’s April decision to block the merger, Microsoft and Activision said they would appeal, so it’s not yet the final word. Assuming, of course, that it’s ultimately able to acquire Activision.Ĭlosing this deal is still much more of an uphill battle than it once appeared to be. It can, of course, decide to stop licensing those games to rivals or letting consumers play them on non-Microsoft cloud platforms once that agreement expires. Microsoft says its deal with the EU will apply globally. “The commitments offered by Microsoft will enable for the first time the streaming of such games in any cloud game streaming services, enhancing competition and opportunities for growth,” Vestager said in a statement. The company said it would license Activision games to rival cloud game streaming services and allow consumers to play the Activision games they owned on any cloud game streaming service they wanted. So Microsoft offered a 10-year agreement the EU believes will both assuage competition concerns and buoy the entire industry. She said that cloud gaming was still just a tiny slice of game distribution, and having more games available on it would actually help it grow. ![]() ![]() That is best achieved by allowing the current competitive dynamics in cloud gaming to continue to do their job,” Martin Coleman, who chaired the panel that investigated the deal, said in a statement.īut the EU’s antitrust division had a different view of things, despite being led by Margrethe Vestager, who has positioned herself as one of Big Tech’s biggest foes. “Cloud gaming needs a free, competitive market to drive innovation and choice. The CMA said it appreciated the effort, but it wasn’t enough. Microsoft believed it had done everything necessary to get the okay, noting that it signed multiyear deals with several cloud gaming providers and platforms to make or continue to make Activision games available to their users. The CMA cited fears that Microsoft would have to increase the price of its Game Pass subscriptions to account for the tens of billions of dollars it spent to acquire Activision, that it would make Activision’s titles exclusive to its own services, and that the games were not open to computers that didn’t have Windows operating systems. When the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) rejected the Microsoft acquisition, it was because it believed it would make Microsoft too powerful in the nascent cloud gaming market, as Microsoft has the Xbox Cloud Gaming and PC Game Pass offerings, as well as the Azure cloud computing platform. While Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are both major players in the gaming industry and shouldn’t have much trouble carrying on separately, not being able to merge does hurt their ambitions to get even bigger. ![]() The matter is currently winding its way through the court system in the US and the UK’s decision is being appealed. Microsoft may have a green light to close the deal in the EU, but it can’t actually do it without getting the same from the UK and the US. The decision shows that, though the three countries or regions have expressed similar views about the need to rein in Big Tech’s power, they aren’t in lockstep. But that might not matter much, as both the United States and the United Kingdom are blocking it. One of the last major hurdles to Microsoft’s massive $69 billion acquisition of video game giant Activision Blizzard has been cleared: The European Union has approved the merger, with a few conditions. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |