Microsoft, Activision Meets UK’s Competition Watchdog This Week

Microsoft is ramping up its game further to acquire Activision.

The California-based tech giant reportedly met with the UK's competition watchdog this week to determine what concessions or proposals it must do to smoothen its acquisition of Activision.

You may remember that the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is one of- if not- the first competition watchdog to block Microsoft's deal to acquire Activision to investigate the deal's effects on competition.

Microsoft - UK CMA Meeting Particulars

People familiar with the meeting's discussions mentioned that Microsoft and Activision lawyers met with the CMA in a private meeting to propose remedies and revisions over the CMA's concerns that would hamper competition in the video game industry, per Bloomberg.

According to the sources, Microsoft's lawyers discussed the CMA's provisional findings and assess the feasibility of the remedies they have in mind to both benefit competition and have Microsoft go through with its acquisition of Activision.

However, things may not be in Microsoft's favor from the get-go. A Forbes article mentioned that the CMA thinks that Microsoft's deal with Nintendo to bring Activision and Call of Duty games is inadequate as the Switch isn't powerful enough to run Call of Duty games on its system.

You may remember that Microsoft signed a 10-year deal with Nintendo to bring Xbox games and Activision games, including the Call of Duty series, to Nintendo gaming consoles, making them available to more people.

However, the CMA believes that the Switch can't offer certain graphically intensive multiplayer games like Call of Duty due to hardware limitations and that the Switch doesn't offer a similar user experience to Switch users worldwide in terms of storage, graphics, and framerate.

Additionally, the Switch doesn't offer the same suite of graphically intensive games that the PlayStation and Xbox compete on.

However, the publication notes that the watchdog didn't discuss two key points: the Switch is an aging console that Nintendo could replace anytime soon. With Nintendo and Microsoft's deal lasting ten years, by the time Nintendo releases a new console, the deal will still be in effect, and the new console could support Call of Duty games.

Even if the Switch is here to stay, it doesn't need to natively run Call of Duty or store the whole game on its hard drive; it could offer cloud gaming through the deal and make Call of Duty playable on the Switch.

Disagree To Agree?

Although the CMA mentioned it is against the deal's fruition as its provisional conclusion, it is possible that the CMA's disapproval of the deal could mean it will go through.

Wedbush analysts Nick McKay and Michael Pachter released a note to investors saying that the FTC expects that Microsoft would agree to a series of behavioral remedies such as keeping Call of Duty games available on non-Microsoft platforms for a set period, like what it already did with Nintendo and NVIDIA.

As such, they believe that Microsoft could successfully acquire Activision no later than mid-May. However, the pair believes that Microsoft wouldn't agree to make Activision games available on competing cloud gaming services as part of its remedies to acquire Activision.