Microsoft UK mini win: Call of Duty is no barrier to buying Activision Blizzard

Everything seems to be moving towards Microsoft winning its first big battle to complete its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.. The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has just released an update on its investigation into the purchase and has decided to “soften” its stance on completing the purchase. Because? Because they no longer believe that Microsoft wants to remove call of Duty from PlayStation.

British regulators decided to “narrow down their concerns” around the deal. This is what the body now believes buying Activision Blizzard will not affect the competition in the field of consoles. And he called it unlikely that the popular military shooter is no longer offered on Sony consoles.

But be careful this does not mean that the CMA has approved the deal. The investigation is still ongoing and the next April 26 date is being kept to announce whether the deal has been approved or not.

“The most significant new evidence provided by the CMA concerns Microsoft’s financial incentives to make Activision games, including Call of Duty (CoD), exclusive to its own consoles. While the initial CMA analysis indicated that this strategy would be profitable in most scenarios, new data (providing a better understanding of the actual buying behavior of CoD players) indicates that this strategy will result in significant losses in any scenario. On this basis, the updated analysis now indicates that it would not be commercially beneficial for Microsoft to make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox after the deal, but rather that Microsoft would still have an incentive to continue making the game available on PlayStation.”

A fragment of the CMA’s new opinion on the purchase of Activision Blizzard.

However, the CMA still has one important issue that it would like to discuss: Impact of Activision Blizzard Purchase on Cloud Gaming Platforms.

This article is under development. Update regularly to find out more…