“It’s more likely because of the merger than absent the merger to engage in foreclosure of Activision content for library services and cloud streaming services,” says Dr. Lee.

So why didn’t Dr. Lee include cloud and subscriptions in his modeling? “Both are relatively nascent and new compared to console, and the lack of really good data for these services made it very difficult to perform something that I would review as reliable.”

Judge Corley wants to know about subscriptions being a separate market, as the FTC argues, because “aren’t they just a different way to pay for the same games?” Dr. Lee compares Xbox Game Pass to something like Netflix and whether Microsoft might be incentivized to raise prices if it has key content like Activision’s games and whether consumers would switch to another subscription or buy games individually.