Less than a month after it was dismissed, the "Gamer's Lawsuit" is back. The gamers suing to block the Xbox Activision deal have filed an amended complaint, bolstered with additional information provided by Sony.
You'd be forgiven if you've lost track of which lawsuit is which in the myriad efforts to block Microsoft's planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The Gamer's Lawsuit was filed in December 2022 on behalf of 10 seemingly random game fans arguing that the acquisition would be bad for the public, not just Microsoft's industry competitors. A judge dismissed the suit in March, saying that it failed to "plausibly allege" that the merger would have anticompetitive effects.
With that in mind, the suit has now been amended and refiled. The plaintiffs were unable to convince Nintendo and Sony's CEOs to testify here, but Sony was willing to produce a number of documents related to the case. In an April 7 filing (via TweakTown), Microsoft noted that it was "surprised" that the plaintiffs "received document productions from Sony weeks ago."
The amended lawsuit was filed on April 10, with the new information provided by Sony included. Sadly, we haven't gotten to see that info for ourselves. As Florian Mueller notes on his FOSS Patents blog, the charts provided by Sony have been redacted in the public version of the amended suit.
Even with the amendment, it's certainly possible that this lawsuit will be dismissed again, as the court will still have to decide whether or not there's merit to these arguments even with some additional detail. Beyond that, there's not much of interest in the new suit for casual observers - except for one thing. Sizable stretches of the amended Gamer's Lawsuit appear to have been directly copied from the FTC's complaint – a complaint which obviously carries much greater weight than the gripes of 10 random gamers.
I knew this sounded familiar. Plaintiff counsel in the Gamer's Lawsuit almost copies the FTC's complaint word for word.FTC (left in blue) vs Gamer's Lawsuit amended complaint (right in green) pic.twitter.com/sW0WrIS2bDApril 11, 2023
Sony's unhappy about Microsoft's reported cancelation of Redfall on PS5.
