Right, I just wonder if this is who they were talking to.
Possibly. The only two companies that came out against the deal that we know are alphabet and sony
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I admit Brad was a little too belligerant for the public sphere. Compared to me tho, he was nice, I would have said much worse.
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Yep, might be the only good thing the gammon face tories do for the UK. The country may be a mess, but at least weâll have our video games to drown everything out 
Iâm not seeing an obvious route politically though. MS need to develop some leverage I reckon.
Itâs funny to me how people act like Britain is some sort of vital big player. I mean look at their situation going forward: the Tories are supposed to be for business & yet theyâve utterly failed to make the UK an attractive country to invest in (except for billionaire middle easterners buying football teamsâŠ) & in the next general election Labour will most likely win⊠& fill all government positions with British equivalents of Lina Khan.
I mean at some point people need to call a spade a spade & see the UK for what it really is, not what it once was. Itâs only going to get worse. So itâs not like itâs just Microsoft whoâll have problems in that country going forwards.
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This sort of political economic analysis of the UK is a bit superficial, misses most of the key context and also isnât particularly relevant.
The CMA are non political. Their regulatory framework has been around a fair while and the post Brexit implications of that have been clear for a few years.
The argument about investment into the UK and its economy is somewhat a sideshow because the factors determining that are far larger, longer reaching and wider than its regulatory systems.
The CMA decision says that MS has a large share of the cloud market currently and whilst it is signing short term deals (short term relative to the market maturity) to offer content to rivals or startups the longer term incentives for MS to use their own IP to monopolise the market exists. And their duty is to protect that nascent market in the longer term and they cannot do it effectively via monitoring for the reasons they lay out.
Thatâs the whole thing. It is where the SLCâs started and the only thing that has happened is the CMA have been consistent in their view that behavioural remedies do not protect a nascent market in the longer term. Its speculative and based off very dodgy information - but the CMA even acknowledge that.
We sit here and say âwell Cloud gaming is tiny, may not even take off and there may never be a market that matters and long term IP licensing surely at least mitigates the impactâ and we all agree with that. As does the EU. But the CMA havenât invented something here - the view they take on nascent markets was written down before the acquisition and all the way through it. IF this was dreadful for the UK then youâd have expected someone to say âwait a minute this canât be the caseâ but nobody did.
I suspect that we are all overinflating the economic importance of this deal to the UK and indeed massively overstating the ramifications of it not passing.
The beauty of this report is it shows Microsoft isnât halting because of one decision. Continue to proceed as plan.
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Damn, they really are going to fight for this huh.
Problem at hand is we need CMA approval to close the deal as per current requirements. I wonder if these could be renegotiated.
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Could you please share the source of the data which support your decision?
CMA:
(I love this gif and I wanted to use it)
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Glad you got to use it. I remember seeing that in twitter and it had me laughing.
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The CMA was established in 2013 & saying theyâre ânon-politicalâ is an extremely superficial reading of the UK in & of itself. Itâs a neat little trick to handwave away a very valid concern because such organisms (like the BBC whoâre supposed to be âneutralâ yet are entirely partisan) cannot be detached from the overall political mood of the country, especially the countryâs government sector professions.
And I believe people are absolutely misreading the sheer scope & importance of the Activision deal in 2023, specifically post-Brexit UK. This is a 70 billion dollar merger which has been blocked on spurious grounds such as a fantastical projection of a future market dominance (in cloud gaming) & establishing COD as a vital commodity in the overall gaming sector.
Itâs absurd. 20 years ago no one cared about COD. In 10 years from now, it might also be far less popular. Itâs a product after all, i.e. one without any claim to eternal success - just like Disney Marvel are currently finding out at the box office. So when analysing the nitty-gritty details of the CMAâs investigation & eventual block a very simple pattern emerged: negativity at all costs with a goal of stopping the merger.
In hindsight itâs very easy to see what they did.
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Not going to happen in a million years but imagine if MS separated cloud gaming from GP Ultimate. Made it a separate subscription. Would be really interesting for the CMA to see exactly how popular it is just now and how much of the market MS actually has.
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A 70Bn merger that doesnât benefit the U.K. directly. Or certainly not for $70Bn.
Look saying everything is political is a nonsense. The BBC are run by Tories, stuffed with Tory editorial staff and clearly are very pro government. But people claim âoh they are a lefty organisationsâ itâs the same sort of argument about the CMA. It makes no sense. They are essentially just a tough regulator who write down their framework publish it and are clear about what they will and wonât accept. Theyâve not budged from that. So itâs not a surprise. At the very start of this their objections to behavioural remedies were out thereâŠitâs not a new thing. Itâs not like theyâve just invented this to block a deal.
The merits of blocking it or not are a completely different argument. If you look beyond the CMA and their need to demonstrate their ability to protect future markets does a block make sense? Not really. But if you are the CMA who have been given a remit by the Tory government to protect markets for consumers and that is your only measure of success does it make sense? Probably because nobody knows what will happen in the cloud gaming market so why risk letting this deal through? You arenât measured on success of deals but on your KPI of protecting consumers even if that protection is hypothetical.
Brexit has indirectly caused this and we all know has been disastrous for the U.K. letting a bunch of right wing nutjobs and liars get away with it is probably the crime of the century. And look where we are now? Iâm sure we can all agree that had the liars not been allowed to lie and Brexit hadnât happened this deal would have passed already.
But thatâs where we are. Our biggest issues preventing investment arenât the CMA but Brexit itself and our government who cannot do anything but slow growth and act corruptly. Until we can boot this government out and start again none of this can be fixed. One might assume theyâd be on the side of Microsoft but apparently not. Another reason we need to change governments and make Britain outward looking again.
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There are a lot of contradictions going on though. If your argument is that cloud gaming market is so small then who caresâŠ.why wouldnât ms just divest xcloud and then there could be no SLC arising from the acquisition?
The reason they wonât do that is because they are betting on cloud becoming a huge gaming market, far bigger than consoles. Indeed theyâve said this publically.
So the whole argument that âitâs a tiny insignificant marketâ only works if MS themselves werenât planning to turn it into the core of their gaming expansion plans.
You canât have it both ways. I think they probably shouldnât have been talking up the cloud as much as they have. Itâs definitely counted against them here.
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