Microsoft’s bid to get the green light for its Activision Blizzard deal was blocked in the UK barely a few weeks ago. One of the key arguments behind the decision was that the deal would give Microsoft an unfair advantage in the gaming segment, especially in the cloud gaming department. Microsoft’s cloud gaming service has a fairly wide reach and all of it is tied to the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.
However, industry titans like Valve, Nvidia, Steam, and even Amazon are in the game. Sony, on the other hand, also has a fairly popular game subscription service in its portfolio under the PlayStation brand. The European Commission’s approval notes address those exclusivity concerns, too. The agency notes that “Microsoft would have no incentive to refuse to distribute Activision’s games to Sony, which is the leading distributor of console games.”
It also cites the lopsided leadership that Sony enjoys in the market when it comes to the sale of PlayStation consoles against Microsoft’s Xbox series machines. But not everything is rosy for Microsoft. The European Union says, following its lengthy assessment, that Microsoft can harm the competition if it limits the cloud-based game streaming of Activision Blizzard games to its own platform in the future. On the PC gaming side of things, the regulatory body says locking the games to its Windows ecosystem, or degrading the experience on rival platforms would mean Microsoft “could strengthen the position of Windows in the market for PC operating systems.”
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