It is already known that Microsoft and the FTC are in court proceedings over the purchase of Activision Blizzard, after the negative opinion of the competition regulator in the United States. But this is a long marathon, which Microsoft still doesn’t know if it will be able to win. And another obstacle that it was already known that the owner of Xbox would encounter is the European Commission. And everything indicates that the technology will receive a first negative opinionwith an antitrust notice relating to the $69 billion business.
The news is advanced pera Reuters, which cites sources close to the matter, that Europe may join the FTC and make it difficult to complete the deal. According to the agency, Brussels is finalizing the document with the list of objections and concerns regarding the deal, which will then be sent to Microsoft in the coming weeks. The proposed date as the deadline for a decision response from the European Commission is set for April 11th.
Speaking to Reuters, Microsoft said it was continuing to work with the European Commission to address any market concerns. “THE our goal is to deliver more games to more people and this business will prolong the same”, says a company spokesman.
It should be recalled that in a first note regarding the preliminary investigation, the European Commission had already pronounced, stating that “the transaction may significantly reduce competition in the video game distribution markets for consoles and PCincluding multi-game subscription services and/or cloud game streaming services, and for PC operating systems”.
He added that the collected data allowed concluding that the Microsoft has the capacity and financial potential to carry out strategies that close the market to competitors and that this type of strategy it can “lead to higher prices, lower quality and less innovation”, which will ultimately hurt the consumer.
In the UK things are not very different. For the British regulator giving the green light to the deal would be necessary for Microsoft accept a set of concessions that the company ended up not makingthus taking the investigation to a deeper and more time-consuming phase.
In the case of the European Commission, Reuters advances that Microsoft has offered some remedies to try to avoid the declaration of antitrust danger and speed up the regulatory process, but Brussels may not respond to any request before publishing its first official opinion on the matter.
