Tech

Boosteroid charges, rightly, against the British CMA

A little over a week has already passed since the British CMA blocked, in its national territory, the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King by Microsoft. An incomprehensible decision, not so much because of its meaning, since there could be other arguments that justify such a decision, as well as the argument used to justify their decision. As you will remember, both in the initial statement and in the subsequent clarifications, they explicitly mentioned, as they had already done in previous advances, that the purchase would not have a significant effect on the console market.

No, what the British regulator argued was that Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard King could have very detrimental effects on the market for cloud gaming platformsan emerging market with great development potential, according to the CMA, which, however, could be subjected to a situation of clear market dominance by Microsoft, which would have games, the main PC operating system for accessing to them (Windows) and the cloud infrastructure in which these services would be supported (Azure).

Regarding cloud platforms, at this point it is worth remembering that Azure occupies the second position, more than ten percentage points below AWS (Amazon Web Services) and followed by Google. In other words, its position in that market is not dominant. There is little discussion, that is true, regarding the market for operating systems, a space largely occupied by Windows… as far as PCs are concerned, but let’s remember that, precisely, one of the advantages of gaming in the cloud is that allows access from all types of devicesand I wonder (sarcastically, you know what I mean) what market share does Windows have in smartphones, tablets, televisions, consoles, etc.

However, and to prevent regulators from reaching that conclusion, Microsoft signed multiple agreements with cloud gaming platforms. The most notorious were, without a doubt, those signed with NVIDIA for GeForce Now and with Nintendo to bring CoD to Nintendo Switch, but they were not the only ones. In those same days we also told you that he had also signed with Ubitus and with Boosteroid, in all cases for ten years. Thanks to these contracts, Call of Duty would arrive, for the first time, on many platforms that it has never been on. Now, with the decision of the CMA, this possibility is substantially complicated… and that the British regulator claims to have done it to defend competition.

Boosteroid charges, rightly, against the British CMA

At Wccftech they have spoken with Antonina Batova, Boosteroid’s head of strategic communications, to ask her opinion on the CMA’s decision, and the answers given by the company executive are priceless:

«We have no evidence that Activision will start providing games for cloud platforms. In the near future. On the contrary, the cloud gaming community knows that Activision has a pretty tough stance on cloud gaming, which only confirms that they will most likely not be available on cloud gaming services in the future. next. In theory, of course, it is possible that his strategy has changed, but we have no information on this and we do not speculate.

Besides, the CMA ruling is likely to do the opposite of what they claim: slow down innovation and development of cloud gaming by removing Activision’s audience from cloud gaming services. The situation where this content is widely available in the cloud has clear benefits for the market, the competition and, most importantly, for the end customers who could then play high-end Activision games on almost any device, regardless. of its processing capacity or operating system«.

The cloud gaming ecosystem is much more complex than what the CMA seems to see in its future predictions (they tell Google, right?), so movements like the one carried out by Microsoft to guarantee the The arrival of Activision Blizzard games on many of its platforms was intended to be a great stimulus for it. In other words, and as Batova claims, the CMA could have condemned, with its decision, the cloud gaming market to a slower and more tortuous development, by weighing down the competitiveness of said sector compared to that of local gaming on PC and console.

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