The acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft has been completed

21 months ago, Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard. This did not go without obstacles and was met with many complaints from the competition and various regulatory authorities. It was announced last week that the acquisition could go ahead.

In January of last year, Microsoft announced its desire to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. According to opponents of the takeover, Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard would make the latter a very dominant player in the cloud gaming space, among other things. In addition to Call of Duty, Microsoft will also own the popular games World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch. The American company’s approach was to bring games to a wider audience. The European, British and American competition and regulators have thought differently.

The road to takeover was sometimes like a TV series. For example, there were leaked documents and mud was thrown periodically. Microsoft quickly announced that it did not intend to bring these games exclusively to its Xbox platform, but would (continue) also to release games for PlayStation and Switch. Many regulators were particularly concerned about the dominant position Microsoft would gain in the cloud gaming space. After several lawsuits and discussions with European Union authorities, this fear turned out to be unfounded. However, there is still a lawsuit between Microsoft and the US Federal Trade Commission, which is the US stock exchange watchdog. However, the platform stand was found on the right. The FTC will continue to investigate, but the final outcome will likely have no impact on the acquisition.

It is not clear when the outcome of the acquisition will be visible to consumers. The obvious scenario is that Microsoft brings several Actison Blizzard titles to the Game Pass digital subscription service.