Is the saga nearly over? (pic: Microsoft)
Microsoft’s latest set of concessions have reportedly been enough to convince the EU to let the acquisition go ahead.
It’s another day and another entry in the ongoing saga of whether or not Microsoft will be allowed to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion.
Over the last few months, the consensus has been that the deal will be allowed but only because Microsoft has been forced to make numerous concessions, including keeping Call Of Duty multiformat for 10 years, not making any exclusive DLC, and allowing it on other streaming services.
UK monopoly investigators went a step further and suggested that Microsoft buy everything except Call Of Duty, but rumours ahead of the official ruling suggest that the EU is not going that far.
The EU won’t make its judgement public until April 25 but according to Reuters the concessions were enough to convince it that Microsoft won’t be creating a monopoly that would make them unfair competition for Sony.
Microsoft might still be able to win round UK authorities but it’s currently unclear what the position of US officials is, since they’ve been sending mixed messages for a while now.
Previously they’ve been almost as hardline as the UK, and more sceptical than the EU, but this week they granted Microsoft access to internal Sony documents about their plans for future exclusives, which could reveal some embarrassingly hypocritical deals from Sony.
Both companies are trying to bend the truth in their favour though, with Microsoft already seeming to admit that Call Of Duty on the Switch probably won’t run that well, even though they’ve previously insisted that putting the game on Nintendo’s format will open it up to a much larger audience.
This could soon be Microsoft property (pic: Activison)
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Microsoft’s latest set of concessions have reportedly been enough to convince the EU to let the acquisition of Activision Blizzard go ahead.