As part of its campaign to soothe regulators ahead of a potential vote, it announced an agreement with Nintendo to bring ‘CoD’ to the Switch for 10 years.
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If you can remember back to January, Microsoft shook up the gaming world when it agreed to buy Call of Duty-maker Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. If it goes through, it’d be Microsoft’s biggest acquisition and one of the 30 largest deals ever.
Key word: if. The FTC has been fretting over the antitrust implications of this deal and, in a meeting today, regulators could vote on whether to sue to block it from going through. The primary worry: Microsoft produces its own console, the Xbox, and if it were to also own Activision’s games, it could withhold those titles from competitors, such as Sony’s PlayStation.
Given the enormous popularity of Call of Duty, it would be a nightmare scenario for Sony to get frozen out of the franchise. The franchise has generated $30 billion in revenue on its own, and the most-recent release, Modern Warfare II, racked up more than $1 billion in sales in its first 10 days.
Microsoft wants to show it can play nice
Like an alien descending the stairs of a UFO, Microsoft says “We come in peace ✌️.” As part of its campaign to soothe regulators ahead of a potential vote, on Tuesday it announced an agreement with Nintendo to bring CoD to the Switch for 10 years. Microsoft said it made a similar offer to Sony that would make new CoD releases available on PlayStation, but it seems that Sony hasn’t checked voicemail yet..
With its charm offensive, Microsoft is attempting to placate regulators not just in the US, but also around the world. 16 governments have to greenlight its deal for Activision, and only a small minority has approved it so far.
Still, the biggest fight may be on Microsoft’s home turf. Under the Biden administration, regulators have gone full beast mode in trying to block mergers over antitrust concerns. So far during Biden’s term, the DOJ has sued to block eight mergers and the FTC has also sued to block eight. Over the same period of the Trump administration, the DOJ challenged one merger and the FTC five, per the NYT.—NF
