Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has denied taking its cue from the US’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it blocked the Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Activision Blizzard Inc (NASDAQ:ATVI) merger in April.
Sarah Cardell, the CMA's chief executive, said in an interview: “We are absolutely not doing the bidding of other agencies.
“We undertake our own analysis, and we have our independent panel groups who are responsible for those decisions.”
The FTC has a court hearing scheduled for 2 August, in which it will hope to defend its move also to block the deal.
CMA defends its decision
Speaking to the BBC, the CMA boss defended the regulator's decision to block the merger despite the EU Commission clearing the deal on Tuesday.
Fears of restricting the cloud gaming market were one of the largest concerns that regulators in the UK, EU and US grappled with during the investigation, she told Radio 4.
“Our independent group looked very, very carefully at [the proposals] from Microsoft [to alleviate competition concerns] and we concluded that it was not an effective substitute for the competitive functioning of this market,” Cardell revealed.
She argued that the resolutions offered by the tech giants “essentially allow Microsoft to set the terms of trade for this market for the next ten years.”
The Redmond-based firm could pick which cloud-based platforms can receive its games and would be able to structure the terms of each deal, the CMA boss added.
Microsoft had offered in March to let Sony and Nintendo license Call of Duty games on their consoles for the next ten years, but it wasn’t enough to sway the UK regulator.
In the EU’s analysis, it argued that while the deal would harm competition in the cloud gaming industry it wasn’t significant enough to block the whole acquisition.
“Cloud streaming is very limited,” the EU Commission's report stated, arguing that the popularity of series like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft would actually help promote the growth of the service.