Bobby Kotick Disses UK Over Potential Rejection Of The Microsoft-ABK Merger

activision blizzard bobby kotick cnbc interview

Earlier this week, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick appeared on CNBC for a very rare

interview, presumably in response to the UK’s potential rejection of the company’s merger with Microsoft. But, instead of trying to appease the UK Consumer and Markets Authority (CMA) that’s been running the deal through a fine sieve since its announcement, Kotick decides to talk smack about the country instead.

“Well, you look at the UK and you think about the post-Brexit UK, it’s probably the first country where you’re seeing a recession – […] the real severe consequences of a recession,” Kotick said during the interview. “If you’re in the UK, and you have an incredibly educated workforce, you have a lot of technical talent, [and you have] places like Cambridge where the best AI and machine learning is, I would think you would want to embrace a transaction like this, where you’re gonna see job creation and opportunity.”

“And it isn’t really at all about whether it’s Sony’s or Microsoft’s platform; it’s really about the future of technology,” he added. “And you know they’ve said now for the last year, I think Rishi Sunak has said they’d like to be the Silicon Valley of Europe (or of the continent), and if deals like this can’t get through, they’re not going to be Silicon Valley – they’ll be Death Valley.”

Kotick also touched on ABK’s surprisingly good performance in the last fiscal quarter, the future of the video game industry, and the monetization and platform trends over the past decade. He even went as far as suggesting that government regulatory bodies don’t fully understand competition in the video game industry, arguing that Japanese and Chinese studios pose a significantly bigger threat than companies like Activision Blizzard.

Meanwhile, the UK CMA has released its provisional report on its investigation into Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard and its possible effects on market competition. Unsurprisingly, the regulatory body found the merger to be detrimental to competition and could prove to be harmful to the UK gaming market and gamers in the long run. More on that here.

You can also watch Bobby Kotick’s CNBC interview in its entirety in the video below.

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