American software company Microsoft has cleared the final hurdle for the takeover of American video game giant Activision Blizzard. British competition watchdogs announced on Friday that they had approved the deal. However, before the acquisition can be completed, the sale of the cloud gaming rights promised by Microsoft must be completed. With the exception of the British, competition authorities in other countries had already approved the deal.
Britain’s antitrust watchdogs were particularly concerned that the purchase of Activision Blizzard would limit competition in cloud gaming. The games run on servers on the Internet and are only transferred to users’ devices. Microsoft is already strong in the business and, as a concession, offered, among other things, to transfer a number of cloud gaming rights to the games company Ubisoft for 15 years.
Deal announced early 2022
Microsoft and Activision Blizzard announced the deal in early 2022, which was worth approximately $69 billion (65 billion euros). 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 of competition watchdogs was that the company would only offer the games on its Xbox console and its own cloud service. During 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 for cloud platforms from other providers.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
