It's been a rough couple of weeks for the folks over at Activision Blizzard and Microsoft. The two companies were set to merge with each other, bringing about a true consolidation of power. But, it hasn’t been smooth sailing for both companies. In a recent ruling by the CMA in England, the regulatory body stated that if the merger went through it would create a monopoly around the gaming industry with regards to cloud gaming. The fact that Google Stadia died a quiet death has been lost in the maelstrom.
So, what exactly is this merger between Activision Blizzard and Microsoft? Well, in a preview report, we talked about exactly this and how even in the US, the merger has been under serious scrutiny. So much so that the FTC has sued Microsoft in an effort to delay the merger. The deal was closed at $68.7 billion with a B! The lawsuit was filed around Sony, Microsoft, and regulators over the future and competition concerns of Call of Duty. Speaking about the same, the FTC said this acquisition would “enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business.”
This entire merger has been a black eye on the world of gaming and has had regulatory bodies up in arms with concerns of a monopoly. But in Bobby Kotcki’s eyes, the CMA ruling is ‘inconsequential’. The CEO of Activision Blizzard stated, “It is my view that over the course of the next decade, what you're going to see is phones having greater power, greater capability, better graphics; faster ability to broadcast to a large screen. The idea that you need processing in a cloud and that would somehow be more efficient than the local processing capability that exists on phones or other dedicated devices like computers, it actually is almost the opposite of the conclusion that the CMA reached. Their belief was that somehow cloud gaming was going to be the biggest growth area in the industry.".
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