Correct me if I'm wrong, but nowhere is the CMA saying they can't buy anything though? They just cant do purchases of this magnitude which makes sense. They bought Bethesda without any issues and that was already considered to be the biggest aquisition of the big 3 in history.
It's the same argument bandied around about how "Sony is the leader of the console market so they can't do acquisitions anymore because of competition concerns." Of course they can. Just not super big ones like this.
They aren't allowed to do M&A for the cloud space is basically what was judged. That's a problem as Scott_Arm brings up, you're convinced that cloud will succeed therefore we block you now. But no one can guarantee that, so the latter half is the issue here for MS. They are being anchored to a future that hasn't happened.
A big reason why this is a weak platform, is pretty much saying Elon Musk should have spent 40B to make his own twitter, or any billionaire for that matter, and the reality is, and everyone knows it, you can't.
Investment doesn't guarantee success. VR has had billions invested into it by Meta, Sony, Valve and others, where are the banger titles there?
Building a business is like a horse race, you have no idea whose going to win and there's often only 1 winner. Part of the reason why M&A exists is because companies can actually purchase something with known quantities instead of _hoping_ organically it will work out. If it was so easy to spent 70B to organically make hundreds of studios belt out winners in 5 years, believe me, MS would have done it by now, and so would have Google and Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Even at 1B per pop, you could theoretically create 70 banger titles, which is unlikely to be true, because that shows a misunderstanding of the economics of developing and funding of video games.
The reality is, there is as much inherent luck in our own lives for our own success as there is luck for a business to succeed. This is a truth that many don't want to believe. In a competitive market, where everyone offers the same thing, saying the right thing, at the right time, at the right place to the right person could end up with you getting the deal and your competitors not getting the deal. Building a game that some rapper feels like endorsing is enough to cause a spiral to everyone to make your game viral, is not something you can make happen. And they are trying.
We don't know that cloud will win and considering that MS currently doesn't have a direct cloud only service, we don't even know if MS will be the winner here. Game Pass Ultimate users are bundled into cloud regardless if they want to or not, that's very different from a user wanting to pay for cloud for the purposes of cloud playing, versus being given it for free to play around with when you're not at home. The latter will generate usage as we see today, the former, likely would have ended up like Stadia.
By anchoring MS to cloud superiority, in a market that I don't really know yet if it will ever take off anytime soon, MS is basically unable from this point forward to have any type of M&A capabilities as long as they continue to have a cloud service. Essentially, CMA is basically saying, get out of cloud (regression instead of innovation) or you are already the cloud leader (of a market that is barely 1% of the total game market) therefore you can't have anymore.
