British regulator: Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard will hurt industry competition

Beijing, September 2 (Xinhua) British antitrust authorities believe that Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $69 billion will hurt competition in the game console market, subscription service market and cloud game market, and they believe that the deal should be investigated in depth.

The British Market Surveillance Authority (Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA) believes the acquisition will hurt the industry if Microsoft bans competitors from accessing Activision's best-selling games.

"We are very concerned that Microsoft will use its control over popular games such as call of Duty and World of Warcraft to suppress competitors, including recent and future competitors, such as paid subscription services for multi-games and cloud games," CMA said frankly.

Microsoft Xbox competes with Sony and Nintendo, and Microsoft President Brad Smith said: "We want more people to play games, not fewer. Sony is an industry leader and it is worried about call of Duty, but we have promised that the game will be launched on both Xbox and PlayStation on the first day of release."

Some analysts believe that if Microsoft promises to allow rivals access to Microsoft games, the acquisition will do little harm to competition. Kunaal Malde, an analyst at Atlantic Equities, believes that Microsoft should make more concessions and explain the exclusivity in writing.

CMA believes that Microsoft has a strong cloud platform, such as Azure, and it also has PC operating system Windows,Xbox is also very successful, so Microsoft has certain advantages in the cloud game market; if Microsoft combines these advantages with Activision games, it may hurt the competition of nascent cloud game services.

Microsoft's acquisition needs to be approved by major markets such as the United States, the European Union and China.