While theMicrosoft-Activisionmerger faces roadblocks at home, it’s received the green light from South America’s most vibrant democracy. Chile’s Fiscalia Nacional Economica (National Economic Prosecutor’s Office) has just published its approval of the merger, stating that the biggest video game merger in history would not “substantially reduce competition.”
The full statement can be read on theFNE’s website(with thanks toGames Industry.biz). The FNE noted that Activision and Microsoft have overlapping activities in terms of video game publishing and distribution and that the merger would also have an element of vertical integration thanks to Microsoft’s manufacture of Xbox game consoles. However, the prosecutor’s office said that this wouldn’t reduce overall competition in Chile due to “patterns and preferences of video game consumers in Chile.”
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One of the largest concerns with the Microsoft-Activision merger is the potential for certain Activision properties to become Xbox exclusives. Call of Duty is a name that gets thrown around a lot, but as revealed in a survey of Chileans by the FNE, Call of Duty isn’t as popular in South America as it is in the rest of the world. The FNE found that blocking COD from other platforms wouldn’t be likely to shift the overall console preferences of Chileans and that Microsoft is amply discouraged from making Call of Duty exclusive thanks to “significant revenue generated by Playstation.”
“ABK video games, although important, are not the most relevant for consumers in Latin America and […] the players in this market offer highly differentiated services,” the prosecutor’s office concluded.
Call of Duty might not be popular in Chile, but its popularity in the US cannot be denied. That’s why the FTC has made Call of Duty the centerpiece of its argumentsalleging the deal would reduce competition in the US games marketshould Microsoft take the franchise exclusive. Curiously, Microsoft said in its response to the official FTC complaint that it doesn’t actually know how important Call of Duty isor even when the first game was released.
