Microsoft Corp’s Xbox video game division on Tuesday announced new partnerships with Nintendo Co and chipmaker Nvidia Corp as it tries to persuade European regulators to approve its planned US$68.7 billion takeover of game publishing giant Activision Blizzard Inc.
A key audience for the announcements were EU antitrust regulators who held a closed-door meeting on Tuesday with executives from Microsoft and some of its competitors, including Sony Group Corp and Google.
Microsoft announced a 10-year agreement with chipmaker Nvidia to bring Xbox games to Nvidia’s cloud gaming service.
Photo: AFP
Microsoft also said it has signed a similar deal with Nintendo, formalizing a commitment it revealed late last year.
What it does not have is an agreement with Xbox’s chief rival, PlayStation maker Sony, which has sought to convince antitrust regulators around the world to stop the Activision Blizzard merger.
The all-cash deal, which is set to be the largest in the history of the tech industry, faces pushback from regulators in the US and Europe because it would give Microsoft control of popular game franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush.
Photo: Bloomberg
The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive arm, has been investigating whether the merger would distort fair competition to popular Activision Blizzard game titles. It is scheduled to make a decision by today.
Microsoft first announced the agreement to buy the California-based game publisher early last year, but the takeover has also been stalled in the US, where the US Federal Trade Commission has sued to block the deal, and in the UK, where an antitrust watchdog’s provisional report said it would stifle competition and hurt gamers.
Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, has been counting on getting approval in either the EU or Britain to help advance its case in the US.
Microsoft president Brad Smith said at a news conference in Brussels after meeting with regulators on Tuesday that he was “not in a position to say exactly what was said in the hearing room,” but added that Xbox has a much smaller share of the market than PlayStation does in Europe.
He said the deal would be good for the industry by bringing more games to more people.
“For us at Microsoft, this has never been about spending US$69 billion so that we could acquire titles like Call of Duty and make them less available to people,” Smith said. “That’s actually not a great way to turn a US$69 billion asset into something that will become more valuable over time.”
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