It’s been just over a week since the UK CMA blocked Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King in its national territory. An incomprehensible decision, not so much for its meaning, because there could be other arguments justifying such a decision, as well as the argument used to justify their decision. As you may recall, both in the initial statement and in subsequent clarifications, they specifically mentioned, as they had done in previous backups, that the purchase would not have a significant impact on the console market.

No, the British regulator argued that Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard King can have very damaging effects on the cloud gaming platform marketan emerging market with great potential for development, according to the CMA, but which could be exposed to a situation of clear market dominance by Microsoft, which would have the games, the main PC operating system to access them (Windows) and the cloud infrastructure in which these services were supported (Azure).

Regarding cloud platforms, it is worth reminding at this point 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 this market is not dominant. The market for operating systems, a space largely occupied by Windows… is little discussed when it comes to computers, but let’s remember that one of the advantages of playing in the cloud is that allows access from all types of devicesand I wonder (sarcastically, you know what I mean) what market share Windows has in smartphones, tablets, TVs, consoles, etc.

However, to prevent regulators from reaching this conclusion, Microsoft has signed several agreements with cloud gaming platforms. The most famous were undoubtedly those who signed a deal with NVIDIA for GeForce Now and with Nintendo to bring CoD to the Nintendo Switch, but they were not the only ones. On the same days, we also told you that he also signed a contract with Ubitus and Boosteroid, in all cases for ten years. Thanks to these contracts Call of Duty would arrive for the first time on many platforms it had never been on. Now, with the CMA’s decision, that option is considerably more complicated… and that the UK regulator claims it did so in defense of competition.

Wccftech spoke with Antonina Batova, Head of Strategic Communications at Boosteroid, to ask her thoughts on the CMA’s decision, and the answers provided by the company executive are priceless:

«We have no evidence that Activision will start providing games for cloud platforms. In 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. Of course, it is theoretically possible that his strategy has changed, but we have no information about this and do not speculate.

Except, The CMA’s ruling is likely to do the opposite of what it claims: it will slow down cloud gaming innovation and development by removing Activision’s audience from cloud gaming services. Having this content widely available in the cloud has clear benefits for the market, the competition and most importantly for end customers who would then be able to play Activision’s top games on almost any device regardless of its processing capacity or operating system«.

The cloud gaming ecosystem is much more complex than the CMA seems to see in its future predictions (they tell Google that, right?), so moves like the one Microsoft made to guarantee the arrival of Activision Blizzard games on many of its platforms were meant to be big incentive for it. In other words, and as Baťová claims, the CMA’s decision could have condemned the cloud game market to a slower and more meandering development, by reducing the competitiveness of the said sector compared to local gaming on PC and consoles.