The U.K.’s anti-trust regulator, the Competition Market Authority (CMA), approved Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard on the 13th (local time). It has been 21 months since Microsoft announced the acquisition of Blizzard in January last year.
In a press release on the same day, the CMA said that concerns over competition restrictions have been resolved by Microsoft’s revision of the contract, adding that “MS’s concessions are a game changer that will promote competition.”
In January 2022, Microsoft unveiled plans to acquire Blizzard, a $68.7 billion merger and acquisition, the highest amount in the history of the information and communications (IT) industry at the time.
Since then, more than 40 countries, including the European Union (EU), have approved the acquisition, but the acquisition deadline has been delayed by three months from July 18 as it has been blocked by U.S. regulators and the British CMA.
The U.K. CMA tentatively concluded in April that it could not take over and even filed a provisional injunction lawsuit asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to order the suspension of Blizzard acquisition transactions.
These authorities feared that competition in the cloud game market would be hindered if Microsoft acquired Blizzard, a powerhouse in console and PC games, with “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft (WOW).”
However, the atmosphere changed rapidly when the U.S. court rejected the FTC’s injunction application.
In a rare move, the CMA said immediately after the ruling that it would review the contract again if Microsoft changes its contract structure to help ease concerns over a drop in competition.
In response, Microsoft offered to sell its cloud streaming rights to French game company Ubisoft in August and acquire Blizzard without cloud game rights.
It also addressed the rest of the concerns by adding content that allows the CMA to enforce the conditions for selling copyrights to Ubisoft.
