Sur call of duty, we don’t do lace. Weapon in hand, shoot first to kill the bad guys. Like in the old westerns. But who is the bad guy? For the American “sheriff” of antitrust, it is clearly Microsoft. Thursday, December 8, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which manages competition policy in the United States, declared that it intended to oppose the acquisition of the video game studio Activision, the creator of the famous call of duty. For this, Microsoft released the heavy artillery, or 75 billion dollars (71 billion euros), the largest financial operation in its history.
For the FTC, this takeover will strongly penalize competition and therefore, by extension, innovation and the consumer. However, analysts believe that after this acquisition, the group founded by Bill Gates would only hold 11% of the game publishing market, behind Chinese Tencent and Japanese Sony.
But what the American authorities fear is that the company, already the world’s third largest manufacturer of game consoles, is taking the opportunity to combine the two: the firepower of its Xbox platform and the addictive games of Activision. “Microsoft will have the means and the motivation to manipulate the prices and downgrade the quality of Activision’s products on competing platforms”says the FTC.
“Ideological”
This practice of vertical integration is the new battle of American antitrust. Its boss, Lina Khan, appointed by Joe Biden, is a recognized opponent of the hegemony of digital stars. A renowned lawyer, specializing in competition law, she dissected the strategy of Amazon, a champion in the field. The reproach which is made to Microsoft is of the same order.
Already present in computer systems and game consoles, it descends into content. And when consoles have been supplanted by online games, it will take advantage of its strong position in cloud computing to bring together infrastructure, user data and content under one roof. Capturing the consumer by foreclosing a market.
This vertigo of verticalization that reaches Amazon, Google or Facebook is far from new. In their exciting book The New Western (Le Cherche Midi, 210 pages, 19 euros), the economists Olivier Bomsel and Rémi Devaux recall that the oil company Standard Oil, of Rockefeller, at the end of the XIXe century, was built on this same principle, gradually buying all the players in the sector, from the well to the pump.
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