On January 18, 2024, Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard, the gaming giant behind popular franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Candy Crush. The deal, valued at $68.7 billion, is the largest in the history of the gaming industry and one of the largest technology acquisitions in history.
What does this mean for the future of gaming? How will it affect the millions of gamers who play Activision Blizzard titles every day? And what are the implications for competition and regulators?
En esta publicación de blog, exploraremos estas preguntas y más, mientras analizamos el impacto del acuerdo Activision Blizzard de Microsoft en la industria de los juegos y más allá.
The agreement between Microsoft and Activision has been approved by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), but not without some important concessions.
The deal gives Microsoft a big stake in the gaming industry, but also reveals how cloud gaming is becoming a key battleground for the future. The CMA’s main concern was not the overall impact of the deal on the gaming market, but the specific effect on cloud gaming, which allows gamers to stream games from the Internet without downloading them. To address this concern, Activision agreed to sell its cloud gaming rights outside of Europe to Ubisoft, another major game publisher.
In this way, the CMA believes there will be enough competition in the cloud gaming sector to prevent Microsoft from dominating it.
CMA chief Sarah Cardell said, “We made it clear to Microsoft that we would block the deal unless they resolved our issues and we didn’t back down.”
By selling Activision’s cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft, we have ensured that Microsoft cannot have a monopoly on this important and fast-growing market.”
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is an important step in the gaming industry, but it also raises some antitrust concerns. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been trying to block the deal since last year, arguing that it would give Microsoft too much power over the gaming market and harm competition.
The FTC claimed that Microsoft could use its dominant position to limit the availability of Activision Blizzard’s games on other platforms, especially the PlayStation of its main rival, Sony.
However, in July, a federal judge in California denied the FTC’s request for a preliminary injunction after Microsoft agreed to some concessions.
The most notable was that Microsoft would keep Activision Blizzard’s flagship Call of Duty franchise on PlayStation for 10 years and also bring it to Nintendo’s Switch console. This was seen as a way to address the FTC’s concern that Microsoft could use its exclusive Call of Duty rights to lure gamers away from PlayStation.
But the FTC is not giving up its challenge. The agency is still appealing the judge’s decision and has a hearing scheduled for December. In addition, the FTC is also investigating a new aspect of the deal announced Friday: Microsoft’s partnership with Ubisoft, another major game publisher. Under the partnership, Ubisoft games will be available on Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass subscription service and its Xbox Cloud Gaming cloud gaming platform.
This means that Xbox users will have access to hundreds of games from both Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft for a monthly fee, while PlayStation users will have to purchase them separately.
FTC spokeswoman Victoria Graham said this partnership “presents a whole new facet of the merger that will affect American consumers” and that the agency “continues to believe this deal is a threat to competition.”
The FTC will likely argue that this partnership will further strengthen Microsoft’s position in the gaming market and make it difficult for other game publishers and platforms to compete.