Sony seems to be desperate to throw any spanner into the works that is the Microsoft – Activision deal, as they have involved themselves in the gamers’ lawsuit.
Video Games Chronicle reports that the California suit has been filed with amendments, which includes new information from both Microsoft and Sony. As a legal matter, both parties complied with a discovery request for documents. Apparently, Nintendo of America was also contacted. But Nintendo did not agree to have their president Doug Bowser placed under deposition, after the initial dismissal.
The suit was originally dismissed by Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley for lack of sufficient evidence, but the same judge gave them the leeway to make refiling the suit possible. Of course, there is more to this than is on the surface.
As explained by Florian Mueller, who read the amended lawsuit, they have abandoned the labor market theory. The plaintiffs could prove that they play games, but are not employees of the game industry.
The amended lawsuit seems to be a revised version of arguments collected from the CMA’s own public disclosure of their own documents investigation the Microsoft-Activision deal. Both the terms high-end console market and multi-game content library subscription appear in their lawsuit. They do also directly cite the CMA itself.
Their main arguments are also seemingly copied from CMA documents, mainly that Activision Blizzard King is a particularly important company, and that the deal would cause vertical harm to consumers, because of the uneven competition between Sony and Microsoft.
They also argue there will be a horizontal harm to consumers, because there is also competition between Activision Blizzard King games and Microsoft’s own games, and after this purchase, Microsoft will no longer have to deal with Activision as a competitor.
Florian has put forward his own explanation for the seemingly photocopied arguments in the amended lawsuit. He believes Sony ghostwrote the amendments for the plaintiffs.
Whether that’s true or not, Florian did verify that Sony provided more information than they would have been legally mandated to provide to help this lawsuit. Florian checked on charts that were redacted from the public. A separate filing confirms that Sony provided them for the lawsuit.
More recently, Florian has updated on Twitter that Judge Corley has set a new court date of April 27, 2023, 1 PM in San Francisco. In the legal language, “Court set briefing schedules on the renewed motion for preliminary injunction and the motion to dismiss.”
While the amended lawsuit is better composed, it reuses arguments that have already failed with the CMA on their own investigation. It’s not clear what chances the amended gamer’s lawsuit has in prospering to block the deal.
As Microsoft have already intimated, they will proceed with the deal regardless of the FTC’s lawsuit vs them. They may take similar action in the case of this suit.
But this may be simply about Sony finding any remaining legal recourse possible to keep the deal from happening, or at least delaying it as much as possible. After all, no less than Sony’s president Jim Ryan stated that they just want to block the deal from going through.
