Sony lashed out at British regulators: it is surprising and unreasonable to change its position on Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen Xiao Zhan for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, April 9 (Xinhua) Microsoft plans to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion, the largest merger in the gaming industry's history. Activision Blizzard owns well-known game series such as call of Duty, while Microsoft is the maker of Xbox consoles. If the deal is approved, Microsoft will become one of the largest game companies in the world.

However, the deal did not go well because it involved competition and antitrust issues. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is one of the bodies responsible for reviewing the deal. Initially, CMA thought Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard could hurt competition because Microsoft might remove games such as call of Duty from Sony's PlayStation consoles or slow down their quality and update speed on PlayStation. CMA even suggested that Microsoft should either abandon its acquisition of Activision Blizzard or the call of Duty series.

However, after receiving more data and comments, CMA changed its position last month, arguing that Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard would not have a material impact on the competition. The reason for CMA is that Microsoft has no incentive to let Xbox monopolize games such as call of Duty, because doing so will result in the loss of a large number of players and revenue on PlayStation. In addition, Microsoft has promised not to remove these games from PlayStation.

The decision aroused strong opposition from Sony. Sony is the maker of PlayStation consoles and Microsoft's main competitor in the game market. In its latest filing, Sony accused British regulators of being "surprising, unprecedented and unreasonable". Sony believes that CMA ignored a lot of evidence and underestimated the competitive harm of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Sony also said, for example, that after acquiring Bethesda, Microsoft cancelled the PlayStation version of Red fall, a game originally planned to be released on all platforms, indicating that Microsoft has the ability and incentive to divest the acquired game from its competitors.

Sony also argued that CMA ignored Microsoft's motivation to abandon PlayStation players to increase the value of its Game Pass, and said that even slight differences in the quality of games on different platforms would have a big impact on players' choices, citing technology comparison sites such as Digital Foundry as evidence.

According to CTOnews.com, CMA is expected to make a final decision by the end of April. In addition to the UK, the deal needs to be approved by regions such as the European Union and the United States. It is unclear how the deal will affect some highly anticipated games in 2023, such as Diablo 4.