Video games lose out in UK’s weak post-Brexit model

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Good morning. A big week in video gaming and probably a big week in the UK’s post-Brexit plans.

On Tuesday, a US federal judge rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block Microsoft’s $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the developer that Duty Play. This made the UK regulator the last hurdle in the way of merger.

There are a number of other FT newsletters handling the actual policy of tech group acquisitions, including full disclosure, where latest version Legal reporter Joe Miller looks at what’s happened so far and the deadline for signing a deal (Premium subscribers can sign up here,

But we have some ideas about its politics and what it says about Britain’s plans, or lack thereof, for a post-Brexit future.

your princess is in another unicorn kingdom

As a committed gamer myself, I have strong feelings about Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard, chief among them being that the big promises and plans being made about cloud gaming are wrong. (Cloud gaming involves streaming games entirely over the Internet, without the need for a console or PC). As a direct result of this, I also think that the blocking of the merger by the UK Competition and Markets Authority – partly because of its concerns that it would destroy the cloud gaming market – was wrong for a number of reasons.

But I also know when I’m starting to move into territory better handled by Unhedged. And in any case, the CMA has now opened the way for the merger to go ahead.

In the context of the focus of this newsletter, what I will say is this: it is not clear to me that putting UK interests first after Brexit will help at all, and as it is, Only The regulator will formally block such high-profile mergers. Even if you think the CMA was right on the merits, this is certainly not where the UK wants to be.

“Come to the UK: it has tighter regulations and a smaller market than the EU” Not a great deal for businesses And as an economic model it doesn’t make much sense.

The lack of political discussion about the CMA’s decision is partly because the video gaming industry, despite all its financial clout, does not hold the same cultural clout as the film industry. But it also reflects a wider void in British politics: the government is led by a politician who was a committed and early Brexiter, and the party’s European supporters have been lost. While, in private, it is not hard to find a Labor MP who thinks Brexit is a disaster, Labor feels constrained by its failed attempt to stop it in 2019 and knows full well that its path to power lies with Leave. passes through the voters.

But neither Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives nor Keir Starmer’s Labor really have a post-Brexit economic model that works. As Robert Shrimsley writes in his column today, it appears that the Conservatives have lost faith that capitalism works.

Part of the problem is that the Brexit campaign was won by people who ideally wanted Britain to be less European, but were making promises that the country would become more European. Secondly, in 2016 nobody used words like “friendshoring” or “de-risking”. In the Conservative Party, talking up the importance of UK-China relations was never a guaranteed way of keeping your leadership ambitions below the water line.

The trade-offs that come with being a small country outside the periphery of the European Union, the US or China have become very sharp. Yes, some Conservative Party critics of modern capitalism have been making these arguments long before 2016. But their dominance is due to the double whammy of Britain’s exit from the European Union and the changes in global politics since then. The Conservative Party’s old economic model is no longer available, and the model many of them had envisioned to achieve after Brexit also looks out of reach. It is not surprising that the party talks as if it utterly dislikes capitalism and that Britain’s relationship with the industries of the future is barely discussed in Westminster.

try it now

Summer is well underway, which means evenings begin to fill with receptions where serious political journalists seek to uncover sources old and new.

I am No serious, so I went to see the new Quentin Dupieux movie, smoking causes cough, It is a Pythonesque parody in which members of a Power Rangers-style group by the name of “Tobacco Force” go on a retreat to get their heads together and stop the destruction of the planet. This is very silly.

Maybe I Should Be Better at Listening to My Own Advice: I Hooked Up with Isabel Berwick to Pilita Clark make this work Podcast to discuss the best ways to survive work receptions and other corporate events.

today’s top stories

• GDP fell 0.1% in May , The UK economy shrank slightly in May due to extra bank holidays that reduced activity, but the decline was smaller than economists had expected.

• historic strike , Junior doctors in England today launched the longest single walkout by doctors in the history of the NHS, a five-day strike that hospital bosses warned would further hamper efforts to deal with backlogs of treatment.

• six percent solution , Rishi Sunak today expected a pay rise of around 6 per cent for public sector workers in 2023-24, but only after ministers have been ordered to find significant savings from his Whitehall budget.

• blob is your uncle , Simon Case, the head of the UK civil service, has condemned the claim as “self-defeating cowardice”, claiming Whitehall is part of a “blob” intent on thwarting the will of the Conservative government.

• new charges , who is edwards facing new charges When his wife identified him as a BBC presenter, The Sun newspaper reported that the presenter had allegedly paid thousands of pounds to a young man under 18 in exchange for explicit photographs, The Independent reported. had paid.