Activision Blizzard acquisition: New Zealand regulator expresses skepticism about cloud gaming

there New Zealand You will join United kingdom and the United State It opposes termination of inadmissibility Microsoft ? The New Zealand Trade Commission has just requested a further delay of its final decision until July 17th, clearly suspicious of Microsoft’s “noble” intentions in its bid to buy Activision Blizzard King for $68 billion. The organizer determines it “At this point, our investigation is focused on whether the proposed acquisition is likely to materially reduce competition due to vertical effects in the distribution of video games to cloud gaming services.”

although Cloud gaming It was not once cited at the beginning of the domestic regulator investigation, and now this still-emerging sector of the economy is key to the debate: “We are concerned that these effects may arise from the combined entity partially or completely denying its cloud gaming competitors, such as Sony or NVIDIA, access to certain Activision content, particularly Call of Duty (CoD) gameplay, at the expense of competition in cloud gaming.” .»

Like CMA, New Zealand seems to ignore solutions offered by Microsoft (Activision’s gaming deals with other cloud gaming services), even though Europe is accepting of these.