'If deals like this can’t get through,' said Bobby Kotick, '[the UK's] not going to be Silicon Valley, [it'll] be Death Valley.'
Yesterday Bobby Kotick gave a pair of interviews to CNBC and The Financial Times, during which Activision Blizzard's longtime CEO. Kotick pointed at comments from UK prime minister Rishi Sunak about the UK becoming"the Silicon Valley of Europe," and warned that"if deals like this can’t get through, [the UK's] not going to be Silicon Valley, [it'll] be Death Valley". Then he said the UK's regulator"lacked independent thought".
This follows a five-month investigation by the CMA, during which it visited various studios and stakeholders, discussed things with the leadership of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, analysed"over 3 million internal documents from the two businesses", surveyed gamers in the UK, and gathered evidence from competitors.
The CMA, as it has from the very start, also focused on Call of Duty. Microsoft has attempted to handwave these concerns away by offering things like its much-vaunted 10-year deal to keep the series on PlayStation but, as the CMA rightly noted in October 2022, contracts can be broken and promises too.
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