Immediately after the British Competition Commission's decision to reject Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft issued a press release via its chairman, Brad Smith, to confirm the company's commitment to acquiring Activision Blizzard.
Microsoft will appeal the decision and will do everything in its power to complete the deal on which many of its future plans in the industry are based:
On the other hand
The UK government's Competition and Markets Authority has taken action to block Xbox from acquiring Activision Blizzard.
The decision to ban the purchase, announced on the government's website, was made owing to the ramifications for cloud gaming. "The deal would change the future of the rapidly growing cloud gaming market, resulting in less innovation and less choice for UK gamers in the years ahead," the CMA stated.
Microsoft has responded by stating that it would appeal the verdict, stating that it is "disappointed" with the outcome, which "appears to reflect a flawed understanding of this market."
As per what went down over the past few days
The CMA stated that Microsoft failed to address its concerns about the deal's impact on the cloud gaming sector. While the CMA determined that Xbox having Activision Blizzard titles such as Call of Duty exclusive to its systems would be counterproductive, it did not reach the same conclusion on cloud gaming.
"Microsoft has a strong position in cloud gaming services and the evidence available to the CMA showed that Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision’s games exclusive to its own cloud gaming service," it said.
"The deal would reinforce Microsoft’s advantage in the market by giving it control over important gaming content such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft. The evidence available to the CMA indicates that, absent the merger, Activision would start providing games via cloud platforms in the foreseeable future."
We don't know yet what will happen when it comes to the acquisition of Activision however, time will tell what will be of it.
