EU Commission Gives Approval For Microsoft’s Acquisition Of Activision Blizzard

For the past few months, Microsoft has been struggling to gain approval from three major regulatory bodies for its billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Now, they have successfully nabbed approval from one of the three: the EU’s European Commission. This approval comes after Microsoft agreed to ensure European Gamers would be allowed to stream their owned Activision Blizzard games “via any cloud gaming service of their choice, and a free license for cloud gaming services in the region to host said games on their platform”.

The European Commission believes that these concessions would be sufficient to mitigate any potential harm the deal could cause to competitors and gaming subscription services:

“These commitments fully address the competition concerns identified by the Commission and represent a significant improvement for cloud game streaming compared to the current situation They will empower millions of EEA consumers to stream Activision’s games using any cloud gaming services operating in the EEA, provided they are purchased in an online store or included in an active multi-game subscription in the EEA.

“In addition, the availability of Activision’s popular games for streaming via all cloud game streaming services will boost the development of this dynamic technology in the EEA. Ultimately, the commitments will unlock significant benefits for competition and consumers, by bringing Activision’s games to new platforms, including smaller EU players, and to more devices than before.”

Although Microsoft has now secured one agreement, the acquisition still needs approval from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to go through.

The CMA dramatically blocked the deal last month, and voiced its disagreement with the European Commission’s decision, stating that it would risk granting Microsoft too much control over the Cloud Gaming landscape,.

“Microsoft’s proposals, accepted by the European Commission today, would allow Microsoft to set the terms and conditions for this market for the next 10 years, they would replace a free, open and competitive market with one subject to ongoing regulation of the games Microsoft sells, the platforms to which it sells them, and the conditions of sale.

“This is one of the reasons the CMA’s independent panel group rejected Microsoft’s proposals and prevented this deal. While we recognise and respect that the European Commission is entitled to take a different view, the CMA stands by its decision.”

Microsoft previously guaranteed they would bring major Activision Blizzard franchises such as Call Of Duty to Nintendo consoles should the deal be approved.

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