British competition watchdogs approve Microsoft’s purchase of Activision

Microsoft has cleared the final hurdle to acquire video game giant Activision Blizzard. British competition watchdogs announced on Friday that they had approved the deal. Before the takeover is completed, however, Microsoft’s promised sale of cloud gaming rights to the games company Ubisoft must be completed.

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.

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard announced the deal, which was worth approximately $69 billion, in early 2022. With the purchase of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft wants to secure popular video games such as ‘Call of Duty’, ‘Overwatch’ and ‘Candy Crush’ and, above all, increase the attractiveness of its ‘Game Pass’ gaming subscription.

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. The contracts will then be renegotiated.

Recently, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard extended their deadline for completing the acquisition to October 18. With the exception of the British, competition authorities in other countries had already approved the deal.

(oli/sda/awp/dpa)