After quite a few attempts on Microsoft’s part to persuade, the US Federal Communications Authority announced that it is suing Microsoft for its purchase of Activision Blizzard in a deal worth 69 billion dollars.
The fear of the federal authority is about harming the competition, since Activision owns a number of prominent titles such as the Call of Duty action series, the beloved brands Diablo, Warcraft and Overwatch, as well as King’s many mobile games, including the Candy Crush series. Although during the inspection senior officials at Microsoft repeated and said that they would not block Sony or Nintendo and were even willing to sign a long-term agreement, this did not really convince the authority.
“Microsoft has already shown that it can withhold content from its gaming rivals,” Holly Vodova, director of the FTC’s Competition Bureau, said in a press release. “Today we seek to prevent Microsoft from gaining control of a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in several dynamic and fast-growing game markets.”
Microsoft expected the completion of the Activision Blizzard deal and as part of that to integrate all the games into the Game Pass package, and perhaps even block the big competitor Sony, even though it said completely different things.
Now Microsoft has to convince the Authority why it should approve the deal and how it will indeed not cause a lack of competition, but the chances of that are slim.