The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has lost its appeal against Microsoft’s acquisition of Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard. Microsoft officially acquired the publisher in October 2023 but not without a bit of pushback from the FTC, which argued at the time that the merger would hurt the games industry. The US District Court for the Northern District of California denied its request for a preliminary injunction, leading to the merger being allowed to go through.
In December 2023, the FTC appealed the court’s decision, though that appeal has now been rejected. In a recent report by Bloomberg, the court ruled that the judge was correct to reject the FTC’s motion for an injunction. It goes a bit deeper than that. The FTC also failed to show evidence that Microsoft, following the acquisition, would prevent rival companies like PlayStation from gaining access to Call of Duty. Last year, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 also launched on PS4 and PS5.
The main argument for the FTC’s appeal was that Microsoft would make several games under Activision Blizzard exclusive to Xbox. While that wasn’t the case, the court argued that this was standard for the games industry anyway. “All major manufacturers have engaged in this practice,” said the court, adding that PlayStation and Nintendo “both have significantly higher number of exclusive games on their platform than [Microsoft] does.”
On the contrary, since the deal has gone through, Microsoft not only continued to release Call of Duty games on PlayStation but also began porting several of its own Xbox exclusives over to Sony’s console including Forza Horizon 5, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle and the upcoming Gears of War: Reloaded.
It seems like Xbox might be going down the publisher route for the future. Once a hardware competitor to PlayStation, this generation has shown the PS5 pull ahead of Xbox Series X/S sales by quite a large margin.
Source: Bloomberg
