Microsoft Buying Activision Blizzard Wouldn’t Substantially Harm Competition, Says Japan’s FTC

wccftech.com:

This morning, Japan's Fair Trade Commission has essentially cleared Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal, determining that the acquisition would not substantially harm competition. The full 43-page long report is available here in the Japanese language.

Needless to say, it is a particularly significant victory for Microsoft, especially since the main opposition to the deal's completion has been raised by Sony, a Japanese company. As you will remember, they argued over and over again that if Microsoft were to make Call of Duty exclusive, that would be a big problem for PlayStation and gamers as a whole.

However, their arguments seem to have fallen deaf on Japan's FTC, and it's not looking promising elsewhere, either. The European Union is rumored to be gearing towards an approval without any structural remedies, and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), believed to be the most problematic to handle for Microsoft, has just amended its own provisional findings to conclude that the console market would not be endangered if the deal went through.

Both the EU and the CMA still have to render their final verdicts, which are expected to be available by the end of next month. The CMA also underlined that it still had concerns regarding the budding cloud market. Still, Microsoft has signed several 10-year contracts with companies like NVIDIA for GeForce NOW, Boosteroid, and Ubitus to show its willingness to bring all of its games, Activision Blizzard's included (once the deal is approved), on other cloud platforms. Given these deals, it's hard to imagine Microsoft won't be able to persuade the CMA to clear those remaining concerns.

Stateside, there's still the wild card of the Federal Trade Commission, which openly sued to