Will Antitrust Undermine the Future of Gaming?
Aurelien Portuese writes in InsideSources that the gaming industry may be on the cusp of an innovation boom as its center of gravity shifts from consoles to the cloud—provided the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) doesn’t muck it up. Few companies are more keenly aware of this than Microsoft, a longtime player in the gaming industry with its Xbox consoles and a leader in cloud computing with its Azure platform.
Redmond’s vision is for the gaming industry to follow a path like the one Netflix blazed for movies and television. That is why it has taken steps to acquire Activision Blizzard, publisher of the wildly popular warfighting game “Call of Duty.”
It all makes sense. Yet the prospect of adding “Call of Duty” and other Activision titles to Microsoft’s portfolio has irked antitrust enforcers. But if the FTC is concerned that games like “Call of Duty” may be removed from competing platforms, then the solution is simple: It could settle with Microsoft, requiring the company to make this content available on other platforms.
