Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision Blizzard Expected to Be Approved in the UK

wccftech.com:

Today marks the beginning of a decisive week for Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the $68.7 billion deal (by far the biggest ever attempted in the gaming industry) that rocked the entertainment and technology world when it was first announced in January 2022.

The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will render its final verdict on Wednesday, April 26th. The CMA had seemed the fiercest thorn on Microsoft's side, having indicated its competition concerns about the deal as early as September 2022. Shortly after that, they launched a deeper probe into the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and as recently as two months ago, prospects looked dire for Microsoft as the CMA said in a press release that the deal could harm UK gamers, both in the burgeoning cloud market and in the established console market, where Microsoft would have reason to make the Call of Duty franchise a partial or total exclusive to Xbox consoles.

For its part, Microsoft always denied that, saying it didn't make any sense from a financial standpoint. In a surprising turn of events, the CMA did a U-turn last month on the competition concerns related to the console market, admitting that it would be heavily damaging for Microsoft to remove Call of Duty from the PlayStation platforms. As such, it dropped its concerns about the console market.

That decision didn't directly affect the cloud market concerns, but Microsoft has been making strides in that regard with four separate 10-year deals to bring all its games (including those of Activision Blizzard should the deal be approved) to cloud gaming services like GeForce NOW, Boosteroid, Ubitus, and UK Internet service provider EE. As such, Microsoft's chances of getting