Honestly, we’ve been back in forth with this but there is no way you can speak authoratatively on this unless you know what the private communications were between MS and CMA were, which none of us knows.
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I was tempted to augment the title with “Fuck the CMA” but that would probably give many folks a heart attack thinking the worst had happened…
Really dont ever want to see another single statement from those chaps ever again. Royal See You Next Tuesdays during this entire process.
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One of the third party objections and the CMA’s response:
5.- Microsoft could circumvent the UILs by moving production of Activision Games to studios outside of the Activision group.
Regarding possible circumvention of the UILs by the release of future Activision content via other studios, the CMA considers that this is already addressed by the definition of ‘Activision Games’ in the UILs. In particular, ‘Activision Games’ are defined by reference to whether they are (i) developed, in whole or in part, by any of the Activision Studios or (ii) based, in full or in substantial part, on intellectual property rights in any Activision developed games that were previously commercially released by the Activision Studios
This kinda sucks as it means no colabs between ABK and XGS and Zenimax 
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Toms been absolutely on the money on this all along. There was never the remotest possibility MS would have risked closure over the top of the CMA.
https://x.com/tomwarren/status/1712720592242131332?s=46&t=hHZd1wXFVO1bo4TppbHkNQ
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Not really. They’d just have to give Ubisoft the cloud rights which there may well be instances that doing so wouldn’t really matter to them.
Also I think there are some creative ways around it for instances where the cloud rights would be an issue. Internal secondment schemes for example….
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Ultimately it’s probably somewhere in the middle. The CMA proposed divestment remedies that it ended up not requiring in the end (remember they suggested MSFT divest all of the CoD business, all of Activision, or all of Activision AND Blizzard, none of which MSFT was forced to do to get the deal over the line). If the CMA had suggested more proportional remedies up front MSFT would probably have taken them more seriously. I’m still of the opinion that had the initial block decision by the CMA gone to the CAT then the CMA would be very hard pressed to defend a full block as proportional to the alleged SLC in the “nascent cloud gaming market”.
In any case it’s all a moot point now. Today we celebrate!
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Think this was obvious to anyone that wasn’t thinking with their platform of choice in mind.
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they can easily get around this.
How? If there are some eg. Infinite Ward employees credited on eg. Halo Infinite 2, it would count as an Activision game by this definition.
Nobody is going to be upset over collabs. Master Chief skins will be coming to CoD/Overwatch/etc.
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No. You misread it. It does not in any way shape or form prevent studio collaborations.
As Zappy already pointed out, that does not prevent collaborations. That concern was about ways to circumvent the sale of the cloud rights to Ubisoft if its an Activision IP.
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Just put any collaborations such as a Toys for Bob Banjo remake under XGS Publishing and call it a day.
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Ooohhhhh helllll yeah!!!
It’s finally over and on jezs birthday,
Congrats to everyone in this chat for coming together, keeping cool, posting all the info and seeing this through to the end.
Happy Friday ya filthy animals
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You can’t have co-development efforts between an XGS and an Activision studio like you have with The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics on Perfect Dark, it would totally count as an Activision game.
/close thread
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So what? That only means the cloud rights are sold to Ubisoft and available for others to acquire.
All native rights remain with MS and they will acquire the use of the cloud rights to make good on their deal with GeForceNow and Boosteroid and other partners, and probably for their own xCloud too.
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Totally agree with you can’t even find a word to describe this clown of a regulator. Atleast it’s over.
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Tho the cloud market is irrelevant now, Microsoft will not won’t to concede streaming rights unless they absolutely have to. AB(K) studios would step in if and only if it’s the last resort to save a failing project.
They can just release the games under XGS or ZENIMAX as it will then count as XGS game. I’m sure every new IP will be under XGS.
This is just a save face attitude from CMA. Do not expect regulators to ever say they were wrong.
EU is the big winner in credibility and working with techs for their own territory benefits. FTC is the big loser and will probably lose budget and action (which is not good in all cases). CMA seems to prove its point, but they have been shown the right path by CAT and the UK gvt (preserving UK attractivity, etc). They appear to have been able to show the world their importance post-brexit, but next time I do not expect them to be so arrogant. In the meantime, they will tell the world that they were always right, but this is just attitude.
MS in the meantime has almost not given up anything (cloud rights ? nobody expected the deal to talk about it, this is so small). Contrary they have been given free reign in console business and mobile, where they can just copy CMA conclusions that these markets are too big to be concentrated. Sony is the ultimate big loser.
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