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Microsoft sued over the Activision Blizzard deal! New year celebrations seem bleak for the company
In a recent lawsuit, gamers claimed that Microsoft's historic acquisition of Activision Blizzard would give the company a monopoly over the video game market. Several lawsuits involving Activision Blizzard have been filed recently, only weeks after US authorities sought to halt the transaction and after Microsoft gave Sony ten years of Call of Duty on the PlayStation platform.
According to GameSpot, gamers—who discreetly withheld their names—are suing Microsoft because the proposed merger will give the gaming giant a monopoly over the industry, enabling it to exclude rivals, restrict output, and restrict output decrease customer choice, manipulate pricing, and stifle competition. On the other side, Microsoft is arguing in favor of the purchase by saying that it would increase competition and provide gamers and game developers more access to the market. However, is that truly what Microsoft wants to accomplish?
We have a lot of stuff to unpack here. The first independent game producer was Activision, and Activision Blizzard is one of the biggest game developers that creates triple-A games of the highest caliber for many platforms. We're obviously referring to Xbox here, but Microsoft is a well-known tech behemoth and probably the biggest tech giant focusing on gaming and producing gaming technology. Therefore, it is simple to understand why the competition is afraid of both client attention and their portion of the gaming business.
As previously mentioned, Microsoft extended an olive branch to Sony and PlayStation by providing 10 years of Call of Duty, but the same offer was extended to Nintendo as well. However, the latter gladly accepted the offer and acquired the most well-known FPS for its systems. Sony is listening to itself rather than the market, and if this purchase goes through, Sony stands to lose a lot. As long as the games are interesting and function well, gamers don't care what technology they're using or who creates them.