They agreed that the cloud market was a concern, but they thought behavioral remedies were sufficient whereas the cma did not. I still need to do some reading on how strict the remedies actually are though. I also need to read up on whether MS are able to do anything sneaky to get past the cma block.
I personally want the deal stopped, because it would give MS the greenlight to continue to buy any and everything they want afterwards until Playstation is starved of content outside of their current first party.
It doesn't, though, and I've said this before. MS getting ABK puts them within spitting distance of PlayStation's revenue, and supersedes Nintendo's easily. It also gives them majority market share in the cloud market in terms of net worth of gaming IP and technology assets, bigger than Sony, Amazon, Google, Apple etcetera on those terms.
So MS could no longer make the argument they need yet other 3P publishers because they're in "last place" in console gaming or need more 3P assets to "experiment" with and grow the cloud gaming space, as those arguments fall apart upon owning ABK. And if by some measure Xbox division revenue takes a nosedive even after acquiring & integrating ABK's revenue into it, then that also works against Microsoft getting other publishers because now it can be argued their acquisitions are costing the market actual, tangible financial losses.
If post-ABK sees a drop in ABK software sales and big drop in Xbox revenue, then a sensible conclusion is that the quality of ABK content offerings degraded under Microsoft's ownership, leading to a reduction of choice in the market for customers because games they at one point could have purchased on the expectation of sound quality, can no longer be purchased (or services offering them, no longer subscribed to) due to the collapse of that
same quality. That harms the market for customers.
So at the very least MS getting ABK holds them up from getting another publisher for a couple of years and in that time frame, if there is one too many RedFall-like situations with ABK games under their ownership, that will negatively impact their ability to make further acquisitions (BTW this is the real reason why Phil Spencer was so frustrated in the X-Cast interview IMHO).