South Korea approves Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard

As China did recently, the Commission on South Korea Fair Trade (KFTC, for its acronym in English) today published the result of its investigation of the purchase agreement between Activision Blizzard and Microsoft, a move so important (and expensive, since it amounts to 68.7 billion dollars) that it is being scrutinized by the competition authorities of practically all international markets.

This Korean body has given unconditional green light to the acquisition, and claims to have no concerns about a possible exclusivity of Activision Blizzard games on Xbox platforms. The document published by the KFTC explains that the games of neither of the two companies have too large a market share in South Korea, so it is not considered that this acquisition could harm competition.

The low popularity of Activision Blizzard games, key in the approval

Something similar led to European Union to approve the purchase: the European Commission stated that Microsoft has a very small market share in Europe, where it sells four times fewer consoles than Sony, according to examples. In United Kingdom they took into account this inequality in market share, but they alluded to the possible monopoly of gaming services in the cloud to deny the purchase agreement.

In South Korea, the competition authority explains that Blizzard’s games are so low in popularity that “there is no risk of foreclosure from the competition”, even if the companies force users to subscribe to a certain service in order to have access to them. The regulatory body itself has recognized that its decision is driven by that lack of popularityso he considers it logical that in other international markets there may be a different response to the analysis of such an important business movement.