What does UK’s ban on Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard takeover mean for gaming?
Microsoft’s attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the development conglomerate behind games including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush Saga, was blocked on Wednesday by the UK’s competition watchdog in a surprise move. The $70bn purchase would have been the largest in gaming history but now, unless the two companies can convince a tribunal to overturn the ban on appeal, it is dead globally.
But what does this mean for tech, gaming and Rishi Sunak’s goal for the “Unicorn Kingdom”?
A massive multi-national games developer, Activision Blizzard has an enormous backlist of titles, runs some of the biggest e-sports on the planet, and comfortably tops bestseller lists every year. But almost all of that is irrelevant compared with the jewel in its crown, the Call of Duty series.
With a new entry pushed out every year by the three rotating studios that share development duty, supported in some way by nearly every other developer owned by the Activision wing of the conglomerate, Call of Duty is a phenomenon: its Warzone multiplayer mode alone was played by more than 6 million people in its first 24 hours.
Sort of, but in a more roundabout way than many expected. Sony, which owns PlayStation, the market-leading console, warned that Microsoft could use ownership of Call of Duty to harm the console market, withholding it from PlayStation or producing a diminished version of it. Microsoft promised not to do that, and offered a deal to guarantee it would be on other platforms for at least a decade (which was taken up by other rivals including Nintendo).
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) accepted that promise and said it did not think the console market would be harmed – leading most to expect it to wave the
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