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Microsoft , in October last year, told the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that its $68.7 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition will help the company expand gaming beyond consoles by bringing “more games to mobile platforms”, suggesting its plans to compete with Apple ‘s App Store and Google Play Store. Phil Spencer , CEO of Microsoft Gaming, has now shed more light on how the company aims to fulfil its ambitions.

Spencer told The Financial Times that the European Union’s (EU) Digital Market Act (DMA) will help the company launch a mobile app store as early as next year. The DMA came into force on November 1, 2022, and will become applicable on May 2 2023. All the companies will have to comply with the Act by March 6, 2024, at the latest.

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The DMA will allow consumers to link up with businesses outside their platforms. This means that companies will be able to load their app stores on iPhones and Android phones. Both Apple and Google have their own app store platform rules according to which developers are required to follow their system to distribute apps and games. Both companies charge up to a 30% cut for using the platform.

“We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play. Today, we can’t do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up,” the Financial Times (via TechCrunch) quoted Spencer as saying.

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The EU is expected to designate Apple and Google as “gatekeepers” under the DMA. The companies that have online intermediation services including app stores, online search engines, certain messaging services, operating systems, and online marketplaces, among others are qualified as “gatekeepers”

DMA is a “huge opportunity”
The report cited Spencer as saying that the deal will increase competition in the “largest platform people play on” (smartphones) where Apple and Google currently have what some antitrust authorities call a “duopoly.”

“The Digital Markets Act that’s coming – those are the kinds of things that we are planning for. I think it’s a huge opportunity,” he was quoted as saying.

Microsoft-Activision Blizzard deal
Microsoft’s deal to acquire video game company Activision Blizzard is under review in various regions. The company has been telling regulators that it wants to improve competition by providing Activision Blizzard games, especially the Call of Duty franchise, on a multitude of platforms.

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Talking about the opportunity in the mobile space, Microsoft previously said that the acquisition will improve its ability to create a next-generation game store that will operate across a range of devices, including mobile, and attract gamers to a new Xbox Mobile Platform .

“The acquisition of Activision Blizzard provides Microsoft with capabilities and content on mobile while creating new distribution options for game developers outside of mobile app stores,” Microsoft said in a response to CMA.

Microsoft recently announced four 10-year deals – two with cloud platforms, Nvidia and Nintendo .

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President Donald Trump dismissed a New York Times report that said Chinese and Russian spies might be secretly listening in on the U.S. leader’s cellphone calls as “incorrect” and “wrong,” calling the report “long and boring.”

“The so-called experts on Trump over at The New York Times wrote a long and boring article on my cellphone usage that is so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it,” the president said in a tweet early Thursday morning.

“I only use Government Phones,” the president said “and have only one seldom-used government cellphone. Story is soooo wrong,” Trump said.

While the president’s initial tweet claimed the report was “wrong,” Trump did not address which specific aspects of the story he was referring to, including its key findings around potential Chinese and Russian spying. The U.S. leader tweeted three hours later: ” The New York Times has a new Fake Story that now the Russians and Chinese (glad they finally added China) are listening to all of my calls on cellphones.

“Except that I rarely use a cellphone & when I do it’s government-authorized. I like Hard Lines. Just more made up Fake News,” the president tweeted.

The Times story said the president had continued to make calls on his mobile phone, despite officials telling him that Chinese spies could listen in on his phone calls and his aides informing him that Russian spies listened in regularly.

The newspaper said officials had raised the alarm about Trump’s cellphone usage and unsecured calls out of frustration over his refusal to stop using unsecured devices.

According to the report, officials said that the Chinese had worked out a list of people the president speaks to, including Blackstone Group chief Stephen A. Schwarzman, who has launched a master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and former Las Vegas casino titan Steve Wynn, who once owned a “lucrative property” in Macau.

The officials warned that China could potentially use its findings from the phone calls to give it an upper hand in its ongoing trade dispute with the U.S.

Trump was not alone in dismissing the report, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying calling the Times ‘s findings “fake news.”

“My reaction to this New York Times report is that certain people in the United States really have been sparing no effort in their pursuit of an Oscar for best screenplay,” Hua told reporters on Thursday, according to Reuters.

She said that if the U.S. was concerned about security issues around Apple iPhones, it should consider switching to China’s Huawei brand.

In addition to his tweet calling the Times report inaccurate, Trump also railed against the “mainstream media” on Thursday morning, tweeting that “a very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News.

“It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description,” the president said, adding: “Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”

Updated: This article has been updated with additional comments from President Donald Trump.

Microsoft is preparing to launch a new app store for games on iPhones and Android smartphones as soon as next year if its $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard is cleared by regulators, according to the head of its Xbox business.

New rules requiring Apple and Google to open up their mobile platforms to app stores owned and operated by other companies are expected to come into force from March 2024 under the EU’s Digital Markets Act.

“We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play,” said Phil Spencer, chief executive of Microsoft Gaming, in an interview ahead of this week’s annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

“Today, we can’t do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up.”

Microsoft is fighting with regulators in the US, Europe, and UK, which have all raised concerns about the potential impact on competition from the owner of the Xbox console buying the developer of Call of Duty, one of the world’s most popular games franchises. PlayStation-maker Sony has been a vocal opponent of the deal.

However, Spencer argued that the deal could boost competition in what he called the “largest platform people play on”—smartphones—where Apple and Google operate what some antitrust authorities have called a “duopoly” over distribution of games and other apps.

“The Digital Markets Act that’s coming—those are the kinds of things that we are planning for,” he said. “I think it’s a huge opportunity.”

Under the DMA, the EU is expected to designate Apple and Google as “gatekeepers,” requiring them to change the rules that govern how apps are distributed on iPhones and Android devices. However, the Big Tech companies could appeal against the designation, delaying enforcement beyond next March’s deadline.

While acknowledging it was hard to predict exactly when Microsoft would be able to launch its own store, Spencer said it would be “pretty trivial” for the company to adapt its Xbox and Game Pass apps to sell games and subscriptions on mobile devices. Microsoft’s current lack of mobile games was an “obvious hole in our capability” that it needed Activision Blizzard to fill, he added.

Hit titles such as Call of Duty Mobile , Diablo Immortal , and Candy Crush Saga , as well as more in development, would be “critically important” in attracting players away from Apple and Google’s marketplaces to an Xbox mobile store, he said.

Microsoft and Apple have tussled for years over how the software giant’s cloud-based gaming service, which is part of Xbox Game Pass, operates on iPhones.

Microsoft has argued Apple’s App Store rules restrict its ability to offer cloud gaming through a single app that runs natively on the iPhone, forcing users to access the service via a web browser, resulting in lower performance.

Apple has denied it blocks cloud gaming apps, but App Store rules require providers to list each game on the App Store individually. Similar to restrictions on Amazon’s Kindle ereader app, Apple does not allow individual games to be purchased from a storefront within native apps.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority announced in November that it was investigating Apple’s stance on cloud games, following its Mobile Ecosystem Market Study.

But the CMA is also proving a significant hurdle to Microsoft completing its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, after the agency last month said the deal raised multiple competition concerns that could only be resolved by a spin-off of its blockbuster Call of Duty franchise.

Microsoft has argued that divesting Call of Duty would undermine its rationale for the deal, which was first announced in January last year. It is trying to persuade the CMA that proposed behavioral remedies, such as commitments to license Call of Duty to rival consoles and cloud services, such as its recent deals with Nintendo and Nvidia, would satisfy its concerns.

In Brussels, Microsoft had made “binding commitments” to the European Commission to make Activision Blizzard content available to rival cloud gaming providers, as part of a deal to appease competition concerns with EU regulators, said people with direct knowledge of the discussions.

The concessions were a sign that regulators in Brussels had dropped key concerns to narrow their investigation on cloud gaming, these people said.

Additional reporting by Javier Espinoza in Brussels

© 2023 The Financial Times Ltd . All rights reserved . Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

The Punjab government has extended the suspension of mobile internet and SMS services till Tuesday noon, even as the hunt for the Khalistan sympathiser Amritpal Singh continued for the third day.

The state authorities had on Saturday suspended the internet and SMS services in the state till Sunday noon.

Later, the curbs were extended till Monday noon.

According to the latest order of the home affairs and justice department on Monday, “It is directed that all mobile internet services (2G/3G/45/5G/CDMA/GPRS), all SMS services (excluding banking and mobile recharge) and all dongle services provided on mobile networks, except for voice calls, in the territorial jurisdiction of Punjab shall be further suspended from March 20 (12 noon) to March 21 (12 noon) in the interest of public safety, to prevent any incitement to violence and to prevent any disturbance of peace and public order.”

Broadband services are not being suspended so that banking facilities, hospital services and other essential services are not disrupted, said the order issued by the additional chief secretary of the home department.

Microsoft’s mobile games store could launch as early as next year, the company’s head of gaming Phil Spencer has said. Thanks to the new Digital Markets Act–legislation that forces Apple and Google to allow users on its platforms to access apps from sources other than the App Store and Google Play Store–Spencer believes that this will create a “huge opportunity” for Xbox.

“The Digital Markets Act that’s coming–those are the kinds of things that we are planning for,” Spencer said in an interview with The Financial Times (via VGC ). “I think it’s a huge opportunity. We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play. Today, we can’t do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up.”

Signed into law back in September 2022 by the European Market, the Digital Markets Act will officially become applicable on May 2. Microsoft has made a big push into the mobile scene with its cloud gaming efforts recently, and the company’s plan to acquire Activision Blizzard is fueled primarily by its goal to increase its foothold in the mobile market . If the deal is approved, Microsoft will own Candy Crush developer King, as well as Call of Duty Mobile, lucrative properties in a market that is estimated to have 238.7 million “active” users in the US alone.

“We don’t have a lot of creative capability that has built hit mobile games. We really started the discussions, internally at least, on Activision Blizzard, on the capability they had on mobile, and then PC with Blizzard,” Spencer said last year . “Those were the two things that were really driving our interest.”

In news related to Microsoft’s $69 billion plans, the European Commission has announced that it has pushed back the provisional deadline to rule on Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard to April 25 . The European competition regulator is one of three key groups that Microsoft has to win over alongside the United Kingdom’s Competition & Markets Authority and the US’s Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is currently suing Microsoft in an attempt to halt the deal while major cross-industry union The Communication Workers of America has urged the European Commission to accept the buyout .

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