Will Xbox Win the FTC Trial? We Asked the Experts

ign.com:

If Microsoft could make a video game that was as successful and beloved by gamers as Call of Duty, it wouldn’t have been in court in late June. That’s the core of the issue, according to economists, the San Francisco judge, and onlookers who await the judge’s decision with baited breath.

“We wouldn’t be here if Microsoft had created Call of Duty,” Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said to lawyers representing Microsoft and the FTC. The law wants people to make their own creative video game smash hits, rather than purchasing them, according to the judge last Thursday.

San Francisco judge says that we wouldn't be here if Microsoft made Call of Duty itself, we're here because it wants to buy Call of Duty. We don't benefit from buying, we want to incentivize people to make their own COD-sized hits. Microsoft lawyer disagrees.

Corley is poised to make a decision within two weeks on whether Microsoft can acquire Activision Blizzard for nearly $70 billion. Most experts IGN spoke to think that Microsoft is likely to win its case against the Federal Trade Commission, though a vocal minority disagree. The FTC and Microsoft declined to comment.

Much of the FTC’s case hinges on Call of Duty, or “a shooter video game,” as the judge put it, and that Microsoft did not make a video game that shot its way to success by itself but is looking to buy one.

Florian Ederer, associate professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, explained to IGN that a key point in antitrust law is that “nobody can really say that you are doing anything bad if you’re the one that organically grew into a dominant player.”

“If you just make amazing games that then give you a very dominant market position, that’s not illegal. That’s perfectly fine,” Ederer