British give the green light
Microsoft can swallow Activision
October 13, 2023, 11:13 a.m
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When Microsoft announced at the beginning of 2022 that it wanted to take over Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard, there was great uproar in the gaming scene. The antitrust authorities are correspondingly suspicious. Over a year later, Microsoft has dispelled all concerns with far-reaching promises.
Microsoft has cleared the final hurdle to take over video game giant Activision Blizzard. British competition watchdogs announced that they were clearing the deal. Before the takeover is completed, however, the sale of cloud gaming rights promised by Microsoft must be completed.
The British antitrust watchdogs were particularly concerned that the purchase of Activision Blizzard would restrict competition in cloud gaming. The games run on servers on the Internet and are only transferred to the users’ devices. Microsoft is already strong in the business and, as a concession, offered, among other things, to transfer some cloud gaming rights to the games company Ubisoft for 15 years.
Microsoft and Activision Blizzard announced the deal, which was worth around $69 billion, at the beginning of 2022. With the purchase of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft wants to secure popular video games such as “Call of Duty”, “Overwatch” and “Candy Crush”. An initial fear from competition watchdogs was that the company would then only offer the games on its Xbox console and its in-house cloud service.
In the course of the investigations, the company promised to make the games available for ten years for other consoles such as Sony’s Playstation or Nintendo’s Switch as well as cloud platforms from other providers. Most recently, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard extended their deadline for completing the acquisition to October 18th. Before the British, the competition authorities in the USA and the EU had already agreed to the deal subject to conditions.