As many regulators around the world rushed to approve Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the UK Markets and Competition Authority (CMA) was much more careful in allowing this mammoth deal to materialize. So today’s announcement is pretty much the official union of Xbox Game Studios and Activision Blizzard.
Because the CMA filed a new brief to publicly announce a change of heart on Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, after obtaining a lot of new evidence in response to the interim findings they shared in February. To shorten the (rather long) report, the new tentative conclusion of the CMA is that the approval of the agreement:
“will not lead to a substantial lessening of competition with console games in the UK.”
The main reason is that new data indicates that making Call of Duty and other popular Activision Blizzard franchises and games exclusive to Xbox and PC consoles would not be commercially advantageous. In fact, it would be a big loss due to PlayStation’s market share and the number of CoD players on PlayStation.
That’s not to say Microsoft can pop the champagne right now, as the CMA remains concerned about how this merger could affect cloud gaming services, so nothing will be final until the end. final report April 26 later than. In any case, Activision Blizzard has more than one foot in Microsoft’s door.