FTC Loses Effort to Block Microsoft's Activision Blizzard Deal - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 14 July 2023 / 5,536 Views
Microsoft earlier this week won its hearings against the FTC as Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley after listening to five days of testimonies denied the preliminary injunction for the FTC and ruled in favor of Microsoft.
The FTC would end up appealing this decision by Judge Corley, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has denied the request for injunctive relief to stop Microsoft from closing the deal until after the results of the FTC appeal are complete.
Microsoft is now free to close its Activision Blizzard deal once the temporary restraining order ends tonight at 11:59 pm PT. The deadline to close the deal by is July 18.
"We appreciate the Ninth Circuit's swift response denying the FTC's motion to further delay the Activision deal," said Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith in a statement. "This brings us another step closer to the finish line in this marathon of global regulatory reviews."
It is possible Microsoft might not be able to close the deal as it was blocked in the UK in April by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Microsoft and Activision Blizzard had appealed the decision and hearings for the appeal were set to start on July 24, however, the CMA and Microsoft have decided to pause litigation to work out a new deal.
The CMA earlier today extended its deadline to make its final order on Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition. The CMA was originally scheduled to release its final ruling by July 18, however, that has been pushed back until August 29. Although it does hope to reach a conclusion before this date.
There was a report yesterday that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are considering giving up some control over cloud-gaming in the UK to appease the CMA. The report said Microsoft might be willing to sell its cloud gaming rights in the UK to a telecommunications, gaming or internet-based computing company. One person said a private equity company might be interested.
Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition has also been approved in Turkey, South Africa, South Korea, China, the European Union, Ukraine, 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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Finally done :) Now let’s enjoy Starfield in September while they will be working on bringing all of those beautiful titles to GamePass!
Don’t think you’ll even have to wait that long. With Bethesda, most of their game catalogue when on to gamepass the day the deal closed. So you may get to enjoy them next week.
I plan to play all the Call of Duty campaigns that they add to Game Pass. But rather than doing it in release order, I plan to do it in chronological order (WWII games first, cold war games second, modern warfare third, and then finally future warfare games fourth). Play them as if they're an on-going narrative series, just to amuse myself. :)
This was basically the last major obstacle. Whether this deal closes tomorrow or 2 months from now, this deal is going to close
That's all I've been saying all along. I never understood the nay-saying. Almost any merger can go through, it's just a question of what concessions will be required, and whether the merger participants are willing to make those concessions.
Microsoft all along seemed hell-bent on doing the deal, and willing to make whatever concession was necessary. Ditto ABK, whose lawyers worked closely with Microsoft's (hilariously allowing the Microsoft lawyers to play "good cop" while the ABK lawyers played "bad cop" in court, LOL.
I very much doubt they went into this planning to divest some portion of the UK assets, offer 10 year contracts to competitors, agreeing to let any current and future cloud provider in the EU (presumably including Sony) stream ABK games without an additional surcharge so long as the customer purchased the game, etc. And yet they've done (or talked about a willingness to do) all those things. Because Microsoft is hell-bent on making this deal happen.
The FTC holding yet another L.
They deserve it, given they're objecting for political reasons rather than the actual merits (or lack thereof) of the deal.
Deal done.
XBox bringing CoD to Game pass next year is going to be a massive deal in the gaming industry. Cod and other Big games on Game Pass will eventually force Sony to bring their best game day 1-7..... on PS plus, and we'll be playing new releases for much cheaper.
Too bad I personally don't care about hardly any Activision Blizzard games. It will be many years before they bring potential games that I will be interested in.
At the beginning, Microsoft said they wanted as many ABK games on Game Pass "as possible". It's my belief that the backwards compatibility team has been hard at work on that ever sense. It'll be very intriguing to see how this goes. There are some pretty damn good games in the Activision back catalogue (X-Men Legends 1 and 2 come to mind!) that I'd be interested in playing again (or even for the first time).
Even a game with licensing issues could still be added with the requirement that you'd have to own the disc, as happened with that 50 Cent game they added to the back-compat list, but isn't available for digital sale.
Aside from any Xbox One or Series X game which would probably be automatic, I think it would then be any 360 game that is backwards compatible, which actually isn’t as expansive as I thought for Activision. There’s things like Cabellas’s Big Game Hunting but not Singularity.
MS had said before they’re done with adding more BC games, so seems unlikely they’d go back on that. The licensing ones would be things like James Bond games and Simpsons Hit and Run. Whilst I’d love to see the latter, it seems too much to hope for.
Most contentious one that they may be able to do for Gamepass is Sekiro, where Activision is the publisher but unclear if it has the rights to the IP.
Microsoft didn't say they were finished adding backwards compatible games. They said they had reached the limits of what they could do with their current technology and current licensing. That latter point is key: buying Activision removes many licensing concerns.
Previously they needed ABK's permission to add an Activision-published game to the back-compat list, and ABK might say no (such as if they thought it being on the list might hurt sales of a future re-release/re-master, as they've been doing with Tony Hawk, Crash, Spyro, etc.).
Microsoft owning ABK means everything from them is now approved for the back-compat list, as that's the way Microsoft does it (eg. adding all the Halo games to the back-compat list, despite also selling Halo: MCC).
Games based on properties not owned by ABK (X-Men, James Bond, etc.) is a problem for adding them to the store for digital sale, but not a problem for adding them to the back-compat list for people who own the disc.
Sekiro is an interesting case, good point.
I just want to know when I'll be able to play Diablo 4 on Game Pass!
Alright CMA the ball's in your court now.
Awesome! Now I want them to close it this weekend, just to see what the CMA is gonna do about it.
Like I said, just take the loss.
Will be intresting to see if these activision games also come day1 to gamepass.
This whole AVB fiasco has become a clown show for the ages.
Finally some common sense prevailed out of all of this. FTC was grilled by Congress and the info that surfaced out of it was crazy and abit late to the party.
