A Brighter Future for Xbox and All Gamers (Premium)

When it comes to Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, all I can do is repeat myself. This is the right thing for gamers, no matter which platforms you prefer.

It's that simple.

21 long months after Microsoft announced that it would buy Activision Blizzard for $67.8 billion, and many, many months after two hair-brained sets of regulatory bodies decided that they would do everything they could---everything from colluding with each other, using overt stalling tactics, and inventing fantastical, evidence-free arguments that were summarily proven false in both court and the public opinion---to prevent this from happening … it's happening. Today, Microsoft finally closed its acquisition. Activision Blizzard is part of Xbox. Queue "We Are Family" by Sister Sledge.

I want to write that this deal was inevitable. But it was everything but that, since an acquisition of this magnitude demands regulatory review on a global scale, given the scope of the business. Which explains why Microsoft initially announced what seemed like a reasonable deadline for closing the acquisition: It expected to conclude matters by the end of its 2023 fiscal year, on June 30, 2023.

How naive that we all thought that was reasonable at the time.

Challenges both real and invented emerged, a reflection of our wider problems with fake news and false facts. But the European Union (EU) provided us with an object lesson in how antitrust regulation should work by providing clarity in both schedule and decision-making, affording this acquisition the attention it deserved, and acting in the best interests of competition in its market. Microsoft responded to maturity in kind by making its concessions to the EU apply globally.

Other regulators were less professional, and less mature. Less adept.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) admitted to colluding in their demented attacks on the deal, with the former inexplicably overtly protecting a Japanese-based company, Sony, which dominates the console market, from its uncompetitive U.S.-based rival. And both regulatory bodies invented a non-existent future market for game streaming to justify their attempts to block the deal, as if they were policing "future crimes" from Minority Report. Imagined future crimes.

By the time that 11 regulatory bodies representing 27 countries worldwide had already approved the deal, the FTC was finally challenged in federal court. And it was then that the hollowness of its lies was laid bare for all to see.

“There are no internal documents, emails, or chats contradicting Microsoft’s stated intent not to make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox consoles," U.S. District Court Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley wrote in a scathing put-down of the FTC's final legal appeal. "Despite the completion of extensive discovery in the FTC administrative proceeding, including the production of nearly 1 million documents and 30 depositions, the FTC has ...