Is the Microsoft-Activision deal dead?

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"The deal that will change the industry forever."

That's how analysts described Microsoft's proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard to GamesIndustry.biz shortly after it was announced last year.

16 months later, and in the wake of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority announcing that it was preventing the deal from happening, that change seems far from certain.

With the future of this merger up in the air, we reached back out to those same analysts to tackle the biggest questions around this latest hurdle for Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.

Reactions to the CMA's decision are mixed. While Niko Partners' president and CEO Lisa Cosmos Hanson believes it to be fully in line with what the UK regulator has been saying throughout the process, Kantan Games' Dr. Serkan Toto describes it as "quite shocking" since the consensus among games industry professionals was that the UK would eventually approve the deal.

Nick Parker of Parker Consulting agrees, adding: "I was surprised at the CMAs decision and would rather the UK had been a follower on this rather than the leader if Europe had been the bearer of bad news first."

However, Ampere Analysis' Piers Harding-Rolls argues that whether or not this is a reasonable decision depends on whether you believe streaming will become the standard form of games distribution within the next five to ten years. The analyst's own opinion is that it will take at least that long for cloud gaming to become "more than a footnote across the games sector."

"The games market is so dynamic it’s hard to predict a long-term outlook in terms of changes in distribution," he adds. "Usage is growing