Microsoft isn’t interested in acquiring Activision without Call of Duty

Yesterday, Microsoft had a meeting with the European Commission to further discuss the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Shortly after, Microsoft held its own press briefing to answer a few questions about the deal and the ongoing process. During this, Microsoft President, Brad Smith, was asked if the company would be open to giving up Call of Duty to get the deal done, and unsurprisingly, the answer was effectively ‘no'. 

The question came up due to the UK's Competition & Markets Authority and its list of proposed remedial measures to approve the deal. One such measure was particularly drastic and involved divesting in Activision and the Call of Duty business.

As reported by Eurogamer, Smith swiftly shot down the idea of Microsoft giving up this much in order to push the deal through, saying: “We just don't see a viable path to sell the Activision studio or Call of Duty game to someone else. So if you're the CMA in the UK, I think you're probably going to want to make a decision.”

While Microsoft won't want to give up Call of Duty in order to close the deal, the company is willing to set the deal up with “behavioural guardrails and remedies” enforced by regulators.

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KitGuru Says: Regulators haven't revealed their stance since Microsoft's recent announcements to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles and Xbox games to a major rival cloud gaming service – GeForce Now. Whether or not these deals will be enough to assuage antitrust concerns remains to be seen. 

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