It's not the CMA's job to make that judgement, that's what expert testimony is for. But: - Residential broadband quality is stagnating in large parts of the w

It's not the CMA's job to make that judgement, that's what expert testimony is for. But: - Residential broadband quality is stagnating in large parts of the world; theoretical peak speeds keep increasing, but so is overprovisioning, and latency is worsening due to increased reliance on 4G/5G for residential connections, leaving vast demographics incapable of having the required stable, low jitter, high bandwidth connection during the typical "prime entertainment" time slots. Noninteractive media can compensate for that easily, interactive… not so much. - Externalizing energy and cooling costs to customers can be attractive, especially in high-cost locales like Western Europe. Additionally, space for data centres close to customers is limited, and competition is high. Microsoft has enough synergies with their other cloud offerings to make this feasible as long as demand is low-ish, but if it dramatically increases, they'll have to make tough decisions wrt pricing. And even if it comes out ahead… this is the sort of monopolist advantage that CMA is worried about. Sony etc. don't have this advantage. (Presumably one of the reasons why Sony's current cloud gaming offerings are noticeably worse in quality.) - Game console manufacturers aren't doing much R&D these days, the machines are standard PCs/tablets with mildly modified off-the-shelf software on top. Customers, meanwhile, are much more likely to be loyal to and seek to justify their invest into the $500 box in the living room, than a service they can subscribe to when a new game comes out, and unsubscribe from at the end of the month when they're done with it. - Leasing has been the dominant model for 10+ years. Steam and other game launcher do not let their customers own anything, and "subscribe to play the 5 most advertised games" services are highly popular. Cloud gaming is not required for this business model. Indeed, freeing these services from the requirement to own a $500 box would make it easier for users to keep switching to whoever has the best offering currently, which reduces profits. - See above, game consoles are already highly standardized with little effort needed to port between them. And cloud gaming just adds more platforms, since each vendor will have his own (vendor lock in) optimized image formats/APIs/whatnots.