Yeah, these "concerns" sound more like, "damn, the deadline about whether or not we're gonna go to phase 2 is coming up and we haven't come up with anything. Reach into this hat and whatever suggestion you pull from the hat will be our concerns"

True, Lol.

I'm being a little fairer with EC, the wording of their article seems more open minded than CMAs was, a lot of "may" and now they're investigating further, it could end up very similar to Brazil's investigation in the end. CMA was more "Microsoft will do this, they will do that, Nintendo who? They aren't competition, they made a Sport title in 2007, Sony Sony Sony"

EC seems more professional and in fact, it's a lot smaller of a statement before Phase 2 than CMAs was so it sort of implies, they have a lot of work left to do. I'm just thrown off by the OS argument, are they adding arguments just to pad their statements out? That's a slam dunk for Microsoft, Lol. 2 issues remain.

I hate the CoD argument at this stage but again EC has a lot of maybes, so we'll see what their investigation says. I'm surprised they didn't mention Azure if anything, that may be a good sign for Microsoft. I don't agree with them splitting streaming services/cloud services into their own market but if they do consider them as such, I think it's at least a reasonable argument to debate.

So, there's 3 concerns, one makes absolutely zero sense and doesn't need more than 5 minutes of discussion on it, one will need investigating but the investigation will show them it's not a concern not worth blocking a deal over, the final one is more complicated and reasonable, but I think easily countered still.

Happy Winter Update Day!

Microsoft said it would work with the EU antitrust watchdog to address valid marketplace concerns.

“Sony, as the industry leader, says it is worried about Call of Duty, but we've said we are committed to making the same game available on the same day on both Xbox and PlayStation. We want people to have more access to games, not less," a Microsoft spokesperson said.

Microsoft's $69 bln Activision bid faces EU antitrust probe | Reuters

Yeah...Microsoft doesn't seem bothered at all, their response to EC is completely different to their response to CMA, which was a brutal putdown, Lol. Maybe happy with EC's response and how it's going behind the scenes? Sticking at 80% chance of passing.

Also, worth noting that EC doesn't seem to treat CoD as unique unlike the CMA does, they only refer to CoD as one of Activision's high profile and successful IPs which is true, it's not as "untouchable" as CMA made it out to be.

Reading between the lines and more carefully, I'm actually feeling more optimistic now, kneejerk reaction to the dumb OS argument but the rest is very vague and just feels like "we need to investigate this stuff, we don't know for sure" it still has dumb arguments like the OS one, but the rest is reading a lot fairer than CMA's, I actually think this may end up with the exact same conclusion as Brazil.

CMA still concerns me.

I'll check it out tomorrow but only for Forge

Likely download those Forge Council maps when they're ready.

The sale by bandai namco is almost like black friday sales good.

Winter Update Launch Trailer | Halo Infinite - YouTube