Competition in the supply of consoles
The CMA provisionally found that a small number of key games, including Call of Duty (CoD), Activision’s flagship game, play an important role in driving competition between consoles. The evidence available to the CMA, including data on how Microsoft measures the value of customers in the ordinary course of business, currently indicates that Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision’s games exclusive to its own consoles (or only available on PlayStation under materially worse conditions). The CMA’s provisional findings note that this strategy, of buying gaming studios and making their content exclusive to Microsoft’s platforms, has been used by Microsoft following several previous acquisitions of games studios.
It is so gratifying to see their decisions with regards to Zenimax come back to bite them on the ass. I wonder if making those games exclusive and attempting to deny choice (our ecosystem or you miss out) to millions of gamers seems as worth it to them now.