Microsoft claims that Activision Blizzard doesn’t make any unique or “must have” games for it to be considered a legal threat to competition.
In its letter to the Commerce Commission in New Zealand, Microsoft defends its bid to acquire Activision Blizzard by tackling concerns raised regarding competition in those markets where the company operates.
According to the software giant, there is nothing unique about the video games developed and published by Activision Blizzard that is a “must have” for rival PC and console video game distributors that could give rise to a foreclosure concern. Microsoft further states that it has demonstrated that it is not withdrawing content from other platforms, having made multiple public statements that it will continue to make Call of Duty and other popular Activision Blizzard titles available on PlayStation through the term of any existing agreement and beyond. The company also plans to take similar steps to support Nintendo’s platform.
Additional justifications regarding the acquisition include other major publishers, including Tencent and Sony, which are now competing with Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass via its new PS Plus subscription tiers. Valve and Epic Games are also seen as competitors by the software giant in a post-acquisition landscape.
Similarly, with respect to mobile games market, Microsoft claims that one of the key drivers of growth is the low barriers to entry. It states that significantly less capital investment is needed in the development of mobile games, as development teams are smaller and generally require less technological innovation. Furthermore, the software giant quotes prominent examples of successful mobile games developed and published relatively quickly with a low budget, such as the mobile versions of Minecraft and Flappybird, which were developed and published by a single individual.
Another interesting point to note is that the Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush franchises represented 82% of Activision Blizzard’s net revenue in 2021. It’s unlikely that Microsoft would want a decline in said revenue going forward by making them exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Sony has an entirely different take on Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, as well as the significance of franchises like Call of Duty.
sir_sri on July 31st, 2022 at 22:16 UTC »
Must have in this case would be more relevant to things like if actiblizz owned the patent on server farms for mmos, or if they bought valve it would mean nearly the whole gaming retail channel.
Microsoft owns DirectX, but you can use opengl, if actiblizz owned opengl (which wouldn't make sense) you'd have a problem.
Similarly they bought epic or unity you'd have concerns about them controlling a huge fraction of the development pipeline. And even that might be ok if it's open source or the like.
Almost no product is a must own - especially not in the video game space. Microsoft already has Forza, so if this was getting them F1 racing, project cars, Gran turismo and need for speed that might be an issue. They own flight simulator and this was getting them DCS and the other serious flight Sims you might have an issue. Intellectual property is by definition its own monopoly, so obviously Warcraft is the must have Warcraft game in the Warcraft IP, but as long as there are other reasonably large mmos and RTS games it's fine.
RTS is the place they might run into trouble. Age of empires and starcraft are big, but they can argue things like Dota and hearts of iron are also RTS, as are a bunch of other big RTS games.
Legally they are probably right here. Buying actiblizz doesn't give Microsoft anti competitive market dominance in any product family, even if wow still had 12 million active subs that's nothing to the whole market these days, overwatch has a bunch of competition as does cod.
If people cared about guitarhero anymore you could see a problem there, as there would be a bunch of very hard to manage legal licencing issues. But most of those patents would be more than 10 years old at this point, so unlikely to be all that relevant since they are going to expire in less than a decade.
A_N_T on July 31st, 2022 at 17:49 UTC »
I mean they're not wrong.
jasoncross00 on July 31st, 2022 at 16:41 UTC »
From a legal "competition" standpoint, this is correct. It's very different from what a gamer thinks of as a "must-have game."