This week brought something of a bombshell for Microsoft: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority delivered its verdict on the company's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and it was a big fat no. Furious executives immediately took to the air to decry the regulator, with Microsoft president Brad Smith going so far as to say the UK government should consider the CMS's future role, adding this was Microsoft's 'darkest day' in four decades in Britain.
This is going to rumble on for some time, because there will be an appeal against the CMA's decision and, frankly, Microsoft has all the money in the world to throw at solving this problem. One tactic it's been following since the regulators began sniffing around is giving out ten-year deals to various cloud gaming services (Microsoft's potential dominance in cloud gaming is an area of concern for almost all of them), in some cases specifically concerning the Call of Duty series.
