Sony Says UK's U-Turn On Microsoft-Activision Deal Is "Surprising, Unprecedented, And Irrational"
The CMA's response is full of errors and oversights, Sony says.
By Eddie Makuch on
The UK government's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published the responses to its provisional finding that Microsoft's proposed deal to buy Activision would not limit competition in the console space. This was a major change, as the CMA originally provisionally said it could.
The response from Sony Interactive Entertainment is what many might have expected. SIE said the CMA did a «u-turn,» calling the move «surprising, unprecedented, and irrational.» SIE said there existed a «significant body» of evidence to support the suggestion that Microsoft could be incentivized to «withhold» Activision content from PlayStation platforms, thus lessening competition.
The CMA said in its updated response that Microsoft would have no financial incentive to make Call of Duty and other Activision content exclusive to Xbox. This is a point that Microsoft itself has been making, saying it makes no business sense to take Call of Duty off PlayStation.
For its part, SIE said it «respectfully questions» the CMA's decision and how it came to it. For some background, the CMA said it was looking at the lifetime value of an average gamer to estimate Microsoft's incentive to make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox.
«SIE respectfully questions whether this can be the case for any model, in particular given the CMA's explanation that 'quantitative modelling is subject to uncertainties and has to rely on assumptions where information is imperfect,' which 'limits the weight we can give this type of evidence.' More specifically, reliance on the revised [lifetime value] model is unsound because it includes serious conceptual errors that bias the analysis in favor of
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