The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has requested some more information on the current deals that Microsoft has with Nintendo and NVIDIA in the wake of the Activision Blizzard acquisition. The new documentation filed yesterday outlines the FTC’s concerns with the information submitted by Microsoft as the merger continues to be put in jeopardy. Now, the governing body wants more insight into the agreements made with both companies.
The FTC alleges in the documents that Microsoft intends to use the agreements to justify the acquisition to regulatory bodies. The thing with the agreements is that despite how much Microsoft has touted the agreements themselves, they haven’t given details pertaining to what’ll happen to Microsoft’s exclusivity plans with content besides Call of Duty. In other words, this also involves content from Zenimax and Activision Blizzard.
One wouldn’t be remiss to remember the fact that games like Starfield were at least planned to be multiplatform prior to the acquisition of Zenimax. Now that the title is exclusive to Xbox, the possibility for exclusivity deals for titles other than Call of Duty exists. Thus, this is why the extent of the FTC’s issues with Microsoft’s statements extends beyond just the military shooter franchise.
Because of this, the FTC also seeks to review all the documents related to the exclusivity of content that Microsoft acquired from ZeniMax and the exclusivity of content they intend to acquire from Activision Blizzard should the merger go through. In other words, that stunt that Microsoft pulled with PlayStation when the former subpoenaed the latter about its third-party exclusivity deals is now going to come back right back at it.
Moreover, the FTC also wants to gain some insight regarding a redacted project involving Microsoft’s next-gen gaming ecosystem. The exact details of this project are unknown but it could be referring to Microsoft’s future plans regarding bringing future games from Xbox to all kinds of platforms… Either that or insight into their future console plans and gaming services, which also does involve cloud streaming.
The FTC states that Microsoft has refused to produce internal documents related to the agreements or communications with third parties other than NVIDIA, Nintendo, and Sony. As such, the tech giant shouldn’t be permitted to rely on these agreements without producing the requested documentation. The document also asks Activision Blizzard to produce documents that were missing from the earlier phase of proceedings, such as the findings relating to the relevance of cross-play, factors that affect customer purchasing, and other kinds of data.
Stay tuned for more updates on this story as they come.
