Microsoft does not lack perseverance. The British competition authority (Competition and Markets Authority, CMA), had blocked, on April 26, the acquisition by the American computer giant of video game champion Activision Blizzard (publisher of successful titles such as call of duty, warcraft, Diablo Or candy Crush), on the grounds that the transaction could create an abuse of a dominant position.
However, the group co-founded by Bill Gates returned to the charge on Tuesday, August 22, with an amended proposal. Objective: to make it possible to lift the reserves of the British gendarme by October 18 and finally complete a takeover announced in January 2022, for an amount unequaled in the sector: 69 billion dollars (63.4 billion euros).
To win the bet, Microsoft proposes to give up acquiring the streaming access rights to existing games in the Activision Blizzard catalog as well as those that will be created over the next fifteen years. They would be resold to the French Ubisoft, which, for its part, could therefore market licenses on Activision content, including with Microsoft’s biggest competitors such as Sony or Tencent.
Thus, Ubisoft would guarantee that Microsoft could not reserve access to Activision’s most prestigious licenses only for its users, which was denounced by the main detractors of the operation, starting with the creator of the PlayStation (Sony ), who did everything to torpedo the takeover from the CMA.
“Not a green light”
The boss of Activision, Robert Kotick, may say that this concession “does not change anything substantial”it nevertheless relates to a segment with a future for video games, that of cloud gaming (online game service available from any terminal equipped with a screen), destined to become the future of video games, while, for many experts, consoles such as X-Box (Microsoft) or PlayStation are destined to disappear.
In its decision of April, the CMA had also stressed that this practice was growing rapidly and that Microsoft was already capturing “60% to 70% of cloud gaming users”. According to the research firm Grand View Research, this sector is expected to experience an annual growth rate of its revenues of 46% between 2022 and 2030. There remains a major unknown in the announcements made on Tuesday: the amount that will have to be paid Ubisoft to the giant of Redmond (north-west of the United States) to exploit the access rights in streaming of the games of Activision Blizzard.
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