While much of the attention being paid to Microsoft this week is justifiably focused on the addition of an OpenAI-powered chatbot to its Bing search engine—check out must-read takes on that from my colleagues Alexei Oreskovic and Jeremy Kahn—there’s also action underway regarding the company’s record-breaking, $69 billion takeover of games publisher Activision Blizzard.
The U.K.’s antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), today laid out what it sees as blockers to the deal’s completion. The CMA thinks Microsoft would unjustly benefit from being able to make Activision games exclusive to its own Game Pass cloud gaming service and would get an even stronger position in that sector, of which it already has a 60-70% market share. The watchdog also warned that Microsoft could use Call of Duty exclusivity to boost Xbox console sales and harm Sony’s rival PlayStation platform. In short, gamers would suffer from reduced competition.
