On October 13th, the UK's antitrust department, the Competition and Market Authority (CMA), announced approval for Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but it did not include cloud game rights. The agency announced that due to Microsoft's concession to sell the cloud game rights of Activision Blizzard to Ubisoft, CMA agreed to re-examine the transaction and launched a new round of investigation in August.
At this point, the last obstacle faced by this skyrocketing acquisition case has been cleared.
Microsoft President Brad Smith said, "We have now overcome the ultimate regulatory hurdles and completed this acquisition, which we believe will benefit global players and the gaming industry
In an email sent to all employees, Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, stated that Activision Blizzard is pleased to start a new chapter with Microsoft and create unlimited possibilities.
On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. This is the largest acquisition of the gaming industry in history. After Microsoft successfully acquired Activision Blizzard, it is expected that its gaming business revenue will rank third in the world, second only to Tencent and Sony.
Gamma Data Senior Analyst Lv Huibo previously analyzed to China Business Daily that considering the revenue volume of Activision Blizzard, this acquisition will greatly affect the gaming industry landscape. He stated that Activision Blizzard has multiple large game IPs, which are also its most critical core assets. In addition, after acquiring Activision Blizzard, Microsoft will have concurrent advantages in multiple fields such as console games, client games, and mobile games. In addition, Microsoft's own advantages and investment in the hardware field may make Microsoft the broadest enterprise in the gaming industry chain, and its business has a higher opportunity for collaborative development.
After the launch of the above-mentioned transaction plan, Microsoft has been seeking approval from regulatory authorities in various regions for the acquisition case for up to a year and a half. On July 11th, a US federal judge rejected the Federal Trade Commission's request to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. At that time, the biggest obstacle Microsoft faced in acquiring Activision Blizzard was only CMA.
In April this year, CMA announced that it would block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard due to concerns that the deal would threaten competition in the cloud gaming market. Previously, Microsoft actively opened up the cloud platform copyright of games under Activision Blizzard, thereby obtaining permission from the European Union for the acquisition case. But similar remedial measures were rejected by UK regulatory authorities.
According to the new agreement, Microsoft promises to enforce the sale of Activision Blizzard Cloud game rights to Ubisoft. CMA stated that as the cloud gaming market takes off, the new agreement will prevent Microsoft from monopolizing competition in the cloud gaming field and preserve competitive prices and services for UK cloud gaming customers.