The European Commission has approved the agreement between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard

Under the EU Merger Regulation, the European Commission has approved Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. This is reported in the corresponding statement on the website of the European Commission.

This comes three weeks after the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s antitrust regulator, in late April 2023 blocked the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. At the same time, even then, some analysts believed that the CMA was trying to “inflate its price” after Great Britain’s exit from the EU, and therefore it was not the first time that it had “attacked” large technology companies.

As of May 2023, the Microsoft and Activision Blizzard deal has been approved by regulatory authorities in the EU, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Serbia, Japan, South Africa, and Ukraine. But as long as the UK CMA and the US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) are against it, the merger will still not happen. Microsoft is appealing the decisions of both regulators, and the European Commission’s statement will be a good argument “for” at least in the US. In the UK, on the contrary, it can only irritate the regulatory authorities.

As a reminder, it recently became known that Activision Blizzard made more money on PC games than on console games for the first time.