Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

Xbox moving ahead with their 10-year assurance to share plan for Nvidia GeForce NOW users, and launching today already.

Gears 5 is available from today, Deathloop, Grounded, and Pentiment follow next week.

Clearly a move to highlight how they are more than happy to help competitors in the cloud gaming space develop their products and improve their customers options. The complete opposite of competitive the behaviour the CMA are concerned about and based their decision on.

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What if MS just says: “We are not buying Activision anymore and just want to help this fledgeling studio. So here, we are donating you a few billion.” Then Activision stops developing for PS…

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Even the Chinese, who are notoriously anti-Western commercial success, support the deal.

Microsoft confirms China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has unconditionally approved its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, making it the 37th country to support the deal !

(https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1659606849316962322/photo/1)

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Microsoft has lodged its formal appeal against the CMAs ruling.

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Good question! It has been dragging on a bit lately. I see this CMA appeal could take months to be processed, so :man_shrugging:t2:

But also I remember reading somewhere that there’s a cutoff point coming soon (June/July?) that if the deal is finalised one way or another MS will have to start paying penalties to ABK to compensate them for keeping them unavailable to other potential buyers for so long.

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Absolutely, what I recall was an intended conclusion of around June/July as you’ve highlighted. My expectation has always been a bit further along like August/September, but with all these delays and whatnot, it may seem like this is pushing further and further out.

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