The general trend of larger corporations taking over their competitors, such as Disney acquiring Marvel and Lucas Films, has been a concern in all forms of digital and non-digital media. Mainly, because it raises the thought that the corporation could become a monopoly in their respective field and raise the prices as they wish and leave the consumer with little choice. The US, alongside other major countries, has tried to regulate this with laws.
Microsoft faced these concerns during its process of acquiring Activision Blizzard and King Franchises. With that, they would have rights to games like Call of Duty, Overwatch, Candy Crush and World of Warcraft.
One of the major concerns from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was that Microsoft would make these games, currently available on a variety of consoles including Xbox’s competitions, Xbox and Microsoft exclusives, and alienate the current fanbases.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) also had concerns about Microsoft raising the prices of the games and distributing them in unfair manners and wanted to optimize choices and services that the general public has access to.
Nicky Stewart, a consultant and former commercial director of cloud services provider UK Cloud, spoke of the regulatory action as a general step in the right direction for the gaming industry as “the CMA has forced Microsoft to make concessions in the UK that other regulators have not. This is good news for the UK’s nascent gaming industry.”
One of the major concessions they had to make was Microsoft giving Ubisoft the rights to stream Activision games from the cloud for the next fifteen years outside of the EU. That limits their current scope and control of the gaming market with Activision games and gives time for their competitors, who may have less resources currently, to break into the market as well.
Despite initial pushback against the regulation, Microsoft reworked the deal and was able to move forward around 21 months after they first announced they would be acquiring Activision Blizzard. Their deal cost them 69 billion dollars.
Even with the concessions, there could be a major change in the future of console gaming as Microsoft now has access to more properties, considering they now own the biggest game publishers in the world, and minds than they ever had before.
“Today, we start the work to bring beloved Activision Blizzard, and King franchises to Game Pass and other platforms,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said in an online statement celebrating the merger. He continued to say that “…when everyone plays, we all win. We believe our news today will unlock a world of possibilities for more ways to play.”
While initial concerns regarding this transaction took a long time to resolve, now that it has been approved fans of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard can hope for their favorite properties to only be enhanced and not diminished. Microsoft plans to let consumers know their plans and additions in the time to come. Still, for those who are highly invested in games, their experience will not be limited to only Microsoft consoles due to the important and necessary regulation by the systems in place.
