Why Cloud Gaming, Not Call of Duty, Might Kill the Microsoft-Activision Merger

ign.com:

After weeks of speculation and rumor that the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) would ultimately approve the $69 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard by Microsoft, this morning’s ruling against the deal came as a surprise to many. But what may have been even more surprising was the object of the CMA’s ire: not Call of Duty, as many expected, but cloud gaming.

Call of Duty, and the possibility that Microsoft might make it Xbox-exclusive upon a successful acquisition, has been at the center of the merger discussion since the deal was first announced last year. But what many may not have noticed is that, at least for the UK regulator, cloud gaming has from the beginning been an equally major concern. And while the gaming giant has repeatedly promised Call of Duty to its console and PC platform rivals enough to assuage the CMA’s console market concerns, fears about Xbox’s domination of the emerging cloud market have continued simmering in the background.

With an appeal on the way that will certainly focus on Xbox’s position in cloud gaming and what that might mean for video games as we know them, let’s take a look at why the CMA is so concerned in the first place, and what might Xbox might do to satisfy its worries and get the UK’s stamp of approval on the most expensive merger in gaming history.

Back in February, the CMA published a massive, 277-page report on what, exactly, it thought about the Xbox and Activision-Blizzard merger at the time. Essentially, the CMA held two “theories of harm” about what would happen if the deal went through. The first of these, and the one that got most of Xbox’s public attention, was its concern about Microsoft making Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox. But the second centered