Activision CEO Bobby Kotick says UK is becoming ‘Death Valley’

There are serious concern being voiced around the world on Microsoft’s proposed $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, with opposition coming not just from Xbox’s competitors, but from all also from Google to Nvidia. You would think that such a precarious situation would require delicate diplomacy, but then, We’re talking about Activision here.

A few days later An Activision exec blessed the world with a completely out of whack, last of us-themed take on the dealthe company’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, went on TV to defend the proposed acquisition and advocate the case of Activision.

Appears on a CNBC In the business segment, Kotick begins the interview in a fairly level-headed, level-headed manner by talking about the uncertainties in the video game industry and the economy at large.

Joys aside, things are moving fast towards the Microsoft purchase. “Whether it’s the FTC, the CMA or the EU, they don’t know our industry,” he says. “I don’t think they fully understand that this is a free-to-play business, that the Japanese and Chinese companies are dominating the industry.”

“You look at Sony, you look at Nintendo, they have these huge intellectual property libraries. Sony has Sony Studios that goes back 80 years, Nintendo has the very best characters in video games.”

He then says that the world’s biggest companies are now Chinese operations like Tencent that enjoy “protected markets” and cites Activision’s own “struggle” to enter the Japanese market as proof that the real competition in the video game space is today not so between American and European companies (ie those they are trying to merge), but between them and the Asian giants.

We could sit here all day and go through these comments. Like huge chunks of the gaming industry, out call of Duty Bethesda’s lineup for most Blizzard games on Xbox’s Game Pass are not free-to-play. For example how Sony Studios could occasionally come in handy for things like Spiderman

but is also full of movies like like primal instinct And Paul BlartMall Cop. Or to say that three of the world’s biggest consumer watchdogs — currently holding the fate of your proposed $69 billion purchase in their hands — have no idea what they’re doing might not be a good idea.

Most unusual, however, are his comments at the end of the interview. There were reported over the weekend that the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is leaning towards saying ‘no’ to Mmicrosoft’s purchase, which would seriously jeopardize the whole thing. In response to this looming threat, Kotick is simply saying Britain should try to block the deal its ambitions to become Europe’s own Silicon Valley

would be toast.

…if you look at the UK and think of the UK after Brexit, it’s probably the first country where you see a recession, like the really bad consequences of a recession. If you’re from the UK and you have an incredibly well educated workforce, you have a lot of tech talent, places like Cambridge where you have the best AI and machine learning, I think you would want to take on a transaction like this where you’re going to be creating see jobs and opportunities and it’s not at all about Sony or Microsoft’s platform, it’s really about the future of technology and you know for the last year now they’ve been saying… that wants to be the Silicon Valley of Europe or the continent, and if deals like this don’t go through, they won’t be Silicon Valley, they’ll be Death Valley.