Microsoft president and vice chairman Brad Smith has said Xbox’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is fair because PlayStation has significantly more exclusive games.
As reported by Bloomberg, Smith said during an annual shareholders meeting that Microsoft would present Sony’s dominant position in the market as one reason for why its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard should go through. The company will defend its colossal deal in court after The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced earlier in December that it would seek to block it.
“The FTC’s case is really based on a market that they’ve identified that they say has two companies and two products, Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox,” Smith said.
“If you look at the global market, Sony has 70% of that market, and we have 30%. So the first thing a judge is going to have to decide is whether the FTC lawsuit is a case that will promote competition or is it really instead of case that will protect the largest competitor from competition.”
Smith added that PlayStation has 286 exclusive games while Xbox only has 59. “So the administrative law judge is going to have to decide whether going from 59 to 60 is such a danger to competition that he should stop this from moving forward.”
The FTC, which announced its intentions to block the acquisition on December 8, said at the time that Xbox would “gain control of top video game franchises” and therefore “harm competition in high-performance gaming consoles and subscriptions services by denying or degrading rivals’ access to its popular content.”
The FTC isn’t the only government body raising concern of the deal either, as both the European Commission and the UK’s Competitions and Market Authority have launched investigations.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
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