Rumor: EU Regulator to Approve Microsoft's Activision Blizzard Deal Next Week - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 10 May 2023 / 5,744 Views
The European Union regulator, the European Commission, will reportedly approve Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition next week, with May 15 as the most likely date, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke with Reuters.
Microsoft in March submitted remedies to the European Union regulator, which includes multiple cloud streaming deals. This includes 10-year deals to bring Xbox games on PC to Nvidia's GeForce Now, Boosteroid, Ubitus, and Nware.
The European Commission does have a deadline of May 22 to publish its final decision on the deal.
Even if the EU regular approves the deal, Microsoft is facing an uphill battle as UK regulator, Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), last month decided to block the deal over concerns with cloud gaming.
Microsoft does plan on appealing the decision with the the Competition Appeal Tribunal in the UK. The company has hired lawyer Daniel Beard KC, who has been able to defeat the EU regulator on multiple occasions.
The deal is also facing issues with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), who filed an antitrust lawsuit in December of last year. The deal has been approved in the Ukraine, South Africa, Japan, Chile, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Serbia.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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If the CMA is the only regulator standing in the way, I see zero chance of the deal not closing. Microsoft will spin off the Activision business in the UK into an independent entity, or something like that.
Michael Pachter announced it will be approved
Kiss of Death
He is a god in disguise.
FYI, before he became a video game analyst, Pachter worked in mergers and acquisitions for 20 years. So his M&A advice may have a higher accuracy ratio.
Well he said the CMA would def approve, so I don't know about his ratio
I have watched a couple of lengthy interviews with Pachter recently, and he seems to make a lot of solidly-reasoned analyses IMO. Analysts by definition are trying to predict the future, so they'll never get it 100% right.
His analyses of past and even reasoning for future occurrences may be solid, but his predictions are more likely than not absurdly wrong.
He works in vide game analysis for over 10 years and is still lousy at it (at least on what he public say), so I wouldn't put much weight on he being good on M&A just because he worked on that for 20 years.
I wonder how much of Pachter's bad reputation comes from people taking one quote, out of context, from a longer discussion, honestly.
Sometimes even with the context, it's bad. Like in 2018, he predicted the Switch would sell 8 million for the whole year. Or that nobody wanted the regular Switch so Nintendo needed to ditch it for only keeping the Lite.
It is possible that a good portion have to do with out of context quote. The problem is I don't remember many situations that doesn't matter the context he was right.
And the thing about taking out of context is that we aren't talking about hindsight, it isn't picking a quote from a year ago and seeing it didn't come true, it is seeing he saying something right now and already being obvious it is wrong/won't happen.
The main comment from Pachter that seems to have kicked off the whole "Pachter is always wrong" meme was his supposed prediction in the early 2010s that consoles were going to die.
That's what the headlines were, but that's not actually what he predicted. He predicted consoles would decline as a proportion of the overall gaming market.
And he's been proven absolutely correct since then. Apple makes more money selling games and gaming-related microtransactions through the App Store than Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo do with their gaming software revenue.
Pretty much the same thing as they said on March 3rd.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/eu-unlikely-demand-asset-sales-microsoft-activision-deal-sources-say-2023-03-02/
I don't believe you.
Heard the same rumor about the CMA.
Yet another rumor...
wasn't the same thing said about the UK? lol...
At this point it's like Microsoft or Activision announcing these stuff, so the public goes overreacting if EU actually bans the acquisition.
There's a lot of underhand stuff at work with this acquisition from Microsoft/Activision. Really crap to see.
How well it matches with the rumor of CMA approving?
This information from Reuters is outdated as it's from March before the CMA made the ruling lol. So I'd put it at the same odds as the rumor of the CMA approving.
Pathetic that such an old rumor is being posted now.
This sounds very familiar. Although I do expect EU will allow the deal to go through but the EU and FTC were always expected to be easy hurdles for MS. It's the CMA that everyone knew would be tough.
Yes,weve heard it before...
