The deal wasn’t immediate and Xbox didn’t provide a timeline for when the acquisition would complete, but the news easily overshadowed Xbox’s last big acquisition, the purchase of ZeniMax Media in 2020, for what now looks like a paltry $7.5 billion.
April 1, 2022 – US Senators raise concerns about Blizzard’s acquisition of Activision Several months after the acquisition was announced, four US senators including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Sheldon Whitehouse sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission. this The letter outlined the concerns that the deal could disenfranchise existing Activision Blizzard employees after allegations of sexual misconduct and other hostile workplace practices.
August 24, 2022 – Xbox has launched the website outlining the benefits of the acquisition To outline the benefits of Xbox’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard to the public, Microsoft launched a website
According to Xbox, the acquisition will mean more games on more devices, more choices for how to buy games, and variety for mobile gamers. Xbox also claims that developers will have easier access to customers, a fairer marketplace, and more flexibility in payment systems.
Activision Blizzard deal compared to other major acquisitions
September 1, 2022 – Call of Duty will continue to launch on PlayStation the same day, as will Game Pass Spencer made a point to make
In another blog post, Spencer confirmed that PlayStation players will receive the new Call of Duty on the same launch day as any other platform, including Xbox Game Pass where first-party Xbox games are released on the day and date as retail.
September 7, 2022 – PlayStation’s Jim Ryan Calls promise of Call of Duty on Xbox ‘insufficient on many levels’ In the first of a series of responses, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan called the promise to bring Call of Duty to PlayStation after the acquisition “inadequate”.
in Statement to Gamesindustry.biz
October 12, 2022 – After concerns raised by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, Xbox says PlayStation is too big to fail The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has raised concerns about Xbox’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard. In response, Xbox said the concerns were unsupported and claimed that the PlayStation was too big to fail.
“The suggestion that a market leader, with visible and enduring market power, could be blocked by a third-largest provider as a result of losing access to a single untrusted address,” Xbox said in a statement
October 31, 2022 – Phil Spencer: Call of Duty will continue to ship on PlayStation ‘as long as there is PlayStation to ship’ In continuing commitments to keeping Call of Duty cross-platform, Phil Spencer said the intent was not to move Call of Duty away from PlayStation gamers and that as long as there was a PlayStation to ship, Xbox would ship Call of Duty to the Sony console.
talking on Brain’s own YouTube channel
The 13 biggest franchises Microsoft will own after the Xbox and Activision deal
November 11, 2022 – Xbox PlayStation is offering a 10-year deal to keep Call of Duty on the platform He was Reported by The New York Times
This deal will also come to reflect a similar arrangement made with Nintendo which we will discuss in more detail below.
December 8, 2022 – The Federal Trade Commission sues to block Activision Blizzard’s acquisition of Xbox In its biggest rebuke to date, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a lawsuit to block Xbox’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
In a press release
In an internal memo, current Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick told employees that while the lawsuit “sounds troubling,” the expectation is that the deal will go through as planned.
December 12, 2022 – Phil Spencer says Sony wants to grow ‘by making Xbox smaller’ In a slight deviation from the tone, Spencer again responded to PlayStation’s attempts to block the company’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard by saying that PlayStation wants to “protect its dominance” by “making the Xbox smaller”.
Spencer appeared on Second budka order
While Spencer spent months talking about how Call of Duty would survive on PlayStation, this was met with Jim Ryan calling these initiatives “inadequate”. Responding to the PlayStation’s dominance, Spencer marks a change in tone as the battle for possession continues to heat up.
Every IGN Call of Duty review
January 5, 2023 – UK Capital Markets Authority extends investigation into Xbox’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard Citing the complexity of the case, the Capital Markets Authority announced that it would extend its investigation into the takeover by up to eight weeks to address the amount of evidence it had collected. In addition, the CMA must also go through the responses it obtained from the public after reaching the opinions on the takeover.
The extension means the final submission date for the CMA’s report on whether Xbox’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard was negative for the industry is now April 26 instead of the original March 1 deadline. That date.
January 30, 2023 – The success of Last of Us on HBO proves Sony’s opposition to the merger is unfounded While not an official statement, Activision Blizzard CCO tweeted Lulu Cheng Meserve
“Sony has an unparalleled advantage in intellectual property, not just in games but in television, film, and music — which can be developed into games, or which can commercialize existing games,” said Meservey. “No wonder their continued dominance as the market leader for consoles. In gaming, Sony is ‘first of us’ — and you’d be fine without the protections of the FTC.”
Meservey pointed to the record-breaking viewership of HBO’s The Last of Us, which is also produced by PlayStation Productions and Sony Pictures Television, as examples of Sony’s vast network.
February 3, 2023 – The European Union issues an antitrust warning to Microsoft According to Politico
In response, Microsoft said it “listens carefully to the European Commission’s concerns and is confident we can address them.”
With the EU, UK and US apparently criticizing the takeover, scrutiny from the world’s top market regulators has only intensified as the deal tries to find a way forward.
February 8, 2023 – Xbox’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard could hurt gamers, CMA says The UK’s Capital Markets Authority has published an interim report on its investigation that has raised many concerns about Xbox’s plans to acquire Activision Blizzard. This included the risks of higher game prices, less choice, and less innovation for UK players.
One area of concern is cloud gaming. According to the CMA, Microsoft accounts for 60% to 70% of the current cloud gaming offering, and making Call of Duty exclusive could “change the future of gaming.”
The CMA also said that making games exclusive to Xbox “could significantly reduce competition between Xbox and PlayStation in the UK”, and “could lead to all gamers seeing higher prices, reduced range, lower quality and worse service on game consoles over time”.[.]”
February 21, 2023 – Xbox signs a 10-year deal to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo, Nvidia Microsoft President Brad Smith confirmed that the company I signed a binding contract for 10 years To bring Call of Duty games to Nintendo owners “on the same day as Xbox, with full features and content parity.” This deal is intended to highlight that the Xbox acquisition will not transform Call of Duty into the Xbox ecosystem, and what better way than to bring Call of Duty to a platform that the series has aggressively ignored in the past?
In particular, the promise to bring Call of Duty games to Nintendo gamers with full content parity seems particularly ambitious given Nintendo’s hardware. performance problems .
On the same day, Microsoft announced a 10-year deal to bring all PC games to Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service, including Activision Blizzard titles. This is a direct response to the UK’s CMA concerns regarding cloud gaming since Nvidia is a major competitor in the service.
With the agreement, Nvidia dropped its concerns about the acquisition, removing at least one major technology company from opposing the deal.
The best Xbox Game Pass games
With months to go before the UK’s CMA’s final report and plenty of hurdles still remaining, it’s likely that we’ll have many more episodes to go before we see any outcome to Microsoft’s plans to acquire Activision Blizzard.
Matt TM Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can access it @tweet .
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