Microsoft has been going through a lengthy process to acquire Activision Blizzard. Ever since the merger announcement came out, the companies had to go through a series of regulators who were determining if this deal would be allowed. If this deal doesn’t seem to hurt the competition, then the team from Microsoft was given the green light to proceed with the purchase. Otherwise, they would have to undergo a series of court battles and conversations to prove that this would not harm competition but further help Microsoft compete with the dominating competitors in the industry today. One of the regulators that have not been fond of this deal going through is the FTC.
The United States Federal Trade Commission has made it clear that they were not in favor of the deal. However, after the legal court battle dust settled, it looked like Microsoft was given the okay to proceed. That left with just one more major regulator, the CMA, who was also not looking forward to seeing this deal go through. After initially striking this merger down, Microsoft was able to provide enough details and alleviate the concerns of cloud gaming by providing Ubisoft with streaming rights for Activision Blizzard releases.
With this new measure presented to the public and the CMA, we’re now finding the FTC is issuing another bid to stop this deal. Thanks to TechRaptor, we’re discovering that the FTC has submitted a motion to investigate this deal further. According to the report, it’s stated that FTC has only learned about the Ubisoft deal after it was made public. That has prompted the regulator to dive a bit deeper to understand the agreements made with Ubisoft and if this deal is even enough to warrant Ubisoft to become profitable enough to license these games.
Unfortunately for the FTC, it looks like we’re just days away from the CMA giving Microsoft the approval to acquire Activision Blizzard. That would prevent the FTC from stopping this merger in time, which might finally close the book on this ongoing headache for Microsoft. But again, we’re left waiting on the approval to come out from the CMA at this point. It’s speculated to happen any day now as well. Afterward, we can start to look into when some of the Activision Blizzard games would land in the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.
