Microsoft’s future projects go through two pillars: on the one hand, the creation of a Super App, which brings together all its services and makes it unnecessary to change the application on our mobile.
[La descarga de Diablo Inmortal ya está disponible en Android: así puedes precargarlo]
The other vital part for Microsoft is in the games sector, where it is one of the biggest competitors in the market with its Xbox platform, both on consoles and on computers, and yes, also on mobile phones. thanks to Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Microsoft won’t be able to buy Activision yet
As part of this strategy, Microsoft announced last January that it would invest $68.7 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest companies in the industry and owner of some of the teams of developers that sell the most games in the world.
Microsoft would get a lot of video game sagas with the purchase
We’re talking about a selection of games that any company would love to have, including titles like Call of Duty, candy Crush (thanks to buying King) or Blizzard games like Diablo there World of Warcraft. All of those licenses would go to Microsoft, and naturally that led to more than one complaint from the competition.
Now, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), a United States government agency, has heeded those complaints, filing a complaint that the purchase could have a “potential impact” on the market, given the history from Microsoft. It is the result of a vote in which only members of the Democratic Party, which controls the FTC, voted in favour.
The main subject of the request is stop acquisition before it is too late; Specifically, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have set a deadline of next July to close the deal, and now that will be nearly impossible with the time needed to resolve the lawsuit.
Call of Duty is one of the most searched games
The lawsuit announcement comes the same week that Microsoft and Nintendo announced an agreement to continue publishing Call of Duty games on the Japanese company’s consoles; Additionally, Valve said such a deal was unnecessary, as it was confident that Microsoft would continue to release its games on the Steam platform. That left Sony alone, which was the biggest stone in Microsoft’s path, refusing to sign such an agreement; European regulators used Sony’s arguments to investigate the deal.
It also means that Microsoft’s idea of an alternative app store is a bit harder to pull off; the company confessed that among its future plans with Activison Blizzard was to launch a store from which users could get apps without having to go through the Play Store. Similarly, Microsoft also wanted access to King’s huge user base of games like Candy Crush with 3 billion downloads.
