Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision gets green light from EU

Microsoft has managed to allay EU concerns over its acquisition of Activision Blizzard King and has been given the green light. The $68.7 billion deal still has hurdles to overcome, for example it was recently blocked by the UK regulator, and the FTC in the US is not yet on board either.

The EU approval came on one condition: Microsoft is required to grant a 10-year license to competing cloud gaming services to allow them to stream Activision games. Here is a tweet from Brad Smith (Vice President and President of Microsoft):

Apparently, this was the key promise that won over the European Commission. Microsoft has its own game streaming service, of course, but users of competing services around the world are now guaranteed access to current and future Activision games for PC and consoles.

Interestingly, concerns from EU and UK regulators centered around streaming. The EU investigation found that Microsoft has no incentive to refuse distribution of Activision games on the Sony PlayStation (citing the statistic that there are four PlayStations for every Xbox in the European Economic Area). And even if Microsoft pulled Activision games from PlayStation hardware, “that wouldn’t significantly hurt competition in the console market.” And those games would still be available to play on non-Microsoft streaming services, according to the deal.

There’s also the FTC, though Microsoft may have gone ahead with the deal without its approval: Microsoft attorney Beth Wilkinson said the deal could go through even without the FTC’s blessing. However, this could have involved approval by UK and EU regulators and the UK Competition and Markets Authority said ‘no’.

In addition to the EU, Microsoft has the green light from Japan, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Chile, South Africa and Serbia. Whether Microsoft’s commitment to the EU will affect the CMA remains to be seen.

In addition to government regulators, some of Microsoft’s competitors have doubts about the deal. However, Nintendo signed a 10-year deal that guaranteed same-day releases of major titles such as call of Duty and other. 10-year streaming deals have been signed with Nvidia, Ubitus and Boosteroid.