The EU has made a judgement call on Activision Blizzard games availability, that is sure to make a lot of gamers unhappy, and possible a little confused.
This covers a broad section of the document, starting from Section 8.3.3.2.1. , on page 189, all the way to page 195 of the document. We will summarize these points below.
TLDR, the EU struck down several demands to make Activision Blizzard games even more available than what Microsoft has done with their ten year deals for Call of Duty. As it turns out, protecting competition does not mean Microsoft has to share their games with everyone, in every possible scenario. We’ll run down each point below so that everything is made clear.
The first request the EU struck down was to allow third parties to sell Activision Blizzard games. They also have to be made with the same quality and content, and the same technical parity clause found in their ten year deals. The reason for all this was to allow Activision Blizzard games to be available to stream everywhere, say, on PlayStation Now.
The EU explains that on consoles, this would not be necessary. That’s because Sony is more than capable to compete with Microsoft without those games. The EU rejected the console gaming theory of harm.
The EU also argues that this also won’t be necessary on PC. In their own words, the EU finds it “highly unlikely that Microsoft would not sell PC games anymore in order to prevent them from being streamed.”
Another market participant asked EU to require Activision Blizzard games be available in all multi-game subscription services. These are referring to Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, and the reason for the request is because both services also offer cloud gaming streaming.
The EU explained simply that their focus is only on cloud gaming itself, and that the ten year contracts Microsoft doled out were enough to address those issues. Of course, now that Sony itself signed one of those ten year contracts for themselves, Sony and Microsoft could work something out about putting Activision Blizzard games in both Game Pass and PlayStation Plus.
Another market participant told the EU to make Game Pass available on PC operating systems other than Windows. That means making Game Pass available on MacOS, Linux based operating systems like ChromeOS, maybe even Steam Deck.
Once again, the EU responded by pointing out their only concern in this regard is cloud gaming. As long as the games can be streamed on the cloud, they will be playable on any of these OSes.
Another complaint brought up was that Microsoft might have the incentive to make bad or degraded versions of Activision Blizzard games on PC, to sell them on cloud gaming. Obviously, the EU just rejected that idea outright.
Another market participant complained that only Windows versions of Activision Blizzard games would be available to stream, unless the EU required the company make native versions of their games on MacOS, Linux, etc. The EU dismissed that idea too, pointing out that they had no interest in changing the current market situation.
Lastly, one market participant complained about the Windows license fees cloud gaming companies have to pay. The EU argues that this was another situation that existed before the merger. So, it’s inappropriate to use this deal to force a change on it.
To sum this all up, the EU says that “by offering a Consumer License and a Streaming Provider License, the commitments proposed by the Notifying Party seem capable of addressing the Commission’s competition concerns.”
Indeed, as radical as it seemed that Microsoft offered those ten year Call of Duty contracts, it had the effect of immediately shutting down any other concerns regulators like the EU had about the deal. In fact, regulators around the world weren’t really concerned about making PlayStation competitive with Microsoft, or making MacOS competitive with Windows.
With all due respect, that is a surface level understanding of the competition concerns this deal had for each country and region that looked into it. These countries and regions looked at a bigger picture, which included not only the gamers that are consumers in their jurisdictions, but also the video game industry jobs, that could also be increased or decreased in their jurisdictions.
Now that regulators have made it clear, hopefully gamers now understand that gamers aren’t entitle to get all the video games on their favorite console. That so many games are multiplatform indicates the high demand that they spread out as much as possible. But, as it turns out, video games don’t have to be ‘fairly’ shared around by everyone.
