Watchdog was right to rule out £55bn Microsoft gaming takeover

LAST week the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) blocked Microsoft's £55 billion takeover of Activision, a video game publisher and cloud gaming company

- Stefan Allesch-Taylor

Cloud gaming is a service where you can stream titles in real time, replacing the need for physical console games.

There has been a lot of angry kvetching by Microsoft and others since the announcement, but not much of substance relating to the deal.

This decision matters for several reasons. Far from being niche, cloud gaming is a multi-industry and multibillion-dollar opportunity; telecommunications, advertising and marketing, entertainment, hospitality, and others all have a growing market to exploit. For context, the most successful piece of media entertainment in history isn't Avatar ($2.8 billion); it's the video game Grand Theft Auto 5, grossing more than $7.7 billion-plus of income since its 2013 release, of which over $1 billion has come from cloud gaming. A game that was developed in the UK.