Activision's Blizzard King's Games Could Skip The UK Under Microsoft

General news News 05/18/2023

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In addition, a European Union official says the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) overestimated Microsoft’s market share in the cloud gaming market.

CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin interviewed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Squawk Box (We should add that this comes at a time when the European Commission has approved the company’s $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard King). Initially, the talk was about OpenAI and creative (generative) artificial intelligence (Microsoft invests in OpenAI). Still, eventually, the conversation shifted to the acquisition of the publisher, which the CMA continued to block.

“Look, I mean, the fundamental logic of this deal, bringing more competition and more opportunity for publishers and gamers, still holds, so as far as I’m concerned, we keep going. We wait for what the European Union decides. We have a process; we respect the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and the CMA to decide what’s good in that country. In some sense, this is the most pro-competitive thing I’ve ever seen. In some sense, it is using a large company’s ability to persist and introduce more competition and, I think, consumer surplus. If the value is the goal and more competition is the goal. The benefit for small publishers is the goal then it checks all the boxes, so I’m shocked,” said Nadella, who warned Sorkin to be patient after he raised the possibility that Microsoft might not sell Activision’s Blizzard King games if it is allowed to buy them. So he didn’t reject it immediately…

The Financial Times reported what the EU official said. When Microsoft announced the service, formerly called xCloud, for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers in August 2020, it was announced as a bonus. Still, many subscribers at that level only tried cloud gaming once or twice because they had the game library locally. In some cases, it is not even possible to play from the cloud. Microsoft has never disclosed how many Game Pass subscribers are in the Ultimate tier. Last January, the Redmond company said it had reached 25 million.

In the European Economic Area, cloud gaming represents a market of about €300 million, which is minuscule compared to the €6 billion for consoles. Still, if Microsoft gets the green light to acquire the company, the ten-year cloud deals would boost the situation…

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech

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Angyal Anikó

Anikó, our news editor and communication manager, is more interested in the business side of the gaming industry. She worked at banks, and she has a vast knowledge of business life. Still, she likes puzzle and story-oriented games, like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, which is her favourite title. She also played The Sims 3, but after accidentally killing a whole sim family, swore not to play it again. (For our office address, email and phone number check out our IMPRESSUM)