Activision Blizzard Games Must Appear on Competing Cloud Services

Activision Blizzard Games Must Appear on Competing Cloud Services
[May 16, 2023, 10:50 am ET] – Share – Viewing Comments

A tweet from Brad Smith outlines one of the consequences of the EU Commission approval of the proposed Microsoft/Activision Blizzard merger. Presumably, this hinges on the deal going through. The Microsoft vice chair and president explains that "popular" Activision Blizzard games must be automatically served through competing cloud services worldwide:

The European Commission has required Microsoft to license popular Activision Blizzard games automatically to competing cloud gaming services. This will apply globally and will empower millions of consumers worldwide to play these games on any device they choose.

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Re: Activision Blizzard Games Must Appear on Competing Cloud Services
May 16, 2023, 17:58

DarkCntry

Re: Activision Blizzard Games Must Appear on Competing Cloud Services May 16, 2023, 17:58

May 16, 2023, 17:58

DarkCntry

RogueSix wrote on May 16, 2023, 12:18:
Finally, to illustrate just how fucking stupid and clueless they are, here is a quote from TPU's article with a direct quote from the EU docs...

EU antitrust regulators have found that Microsoft "would have no incentive to refuse to distribute Activision's games to Sony" and that "even if Microsoft did decide to withdraw Activision's games from the PlayStation, this would not significantly harm competition in the home gaming console market."

^ ROFL ... I'm actually more inclined to believe that M$ bought the EU decision because even for EU standards this is fucking DUMBER than DUMB

Uhh, there's only one incentive to refuse distribution and that is to push hardware, which Microsoft knows it cannot do in non-Western regions, even if they forced exclusiveness of titles to their particular hardware. They also know, in the long run, they make far more money off licensing fees than they would off straight one-shot sales.

That said, I laugh at the thought that people would believe losing something like CoD on Playstation hardware would doom the entire console market. If that were the case, we'd have already seen it with Sony's strong-arming of specific titles to their platform.