Microsoft tries to unlock the largest business operation in the history of the video game industry: the purchase of Activision Blizzard for about 69,000 million dollars (more than 60,000 million euros). The acquisition, announced more than a year and a half ago, has already received the go-ahead in the European Union (EU) and the United States, but has been stymied in the United Kingdom. For this reason, the North American giant of software has presented a new agreement to the British competition authority on Tuesday to unblock the situation.
The creator of the Windows operating system has submitted to the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) a new agreement to take over the video game producer Candy Crush either call of dutyamong others, after the CMA rejected its initial proposal last June.
Microsoft appealed the veto, but the British authority rejected its appeal, considering that the operation “had significant deficiencies.”
“Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, as originally proposed, cannot be carried out“, sentence Sarah Cardell, executive director of the CMA in the statement published this Tuesday by the organization.
The CMA opens a new ‘file’
Thus, the company founded by Bill Gates has decided to take another step to unblock the billion-dollar operation: it has made another proposal to the CMA, which triggers a new investigation by the supervisory body.
Specifically, and if the British authority ends up giving the green light to this approach, Microsoft will not acquire cloud rights of current Activision games for computer (PC) and consoles, nor of new video games released by Activision over the next 15 years. “This excludes the European Economic Area,” clarifies the CMA.
“Instead, these rights will be transferred to Ubisoft Entertainment SA (Ubisoft) before Activision is acquired by Microsoft,” the statement added. In this way, the owner of the Xbox intends provide to an independent content provider (Ubisoft) the ability to supply Activision’s game content to all service providers streaming in the cloud (including Microsoft itself).
Cardell assures that the CMA will “carefully and objectively evaluate the details of the restructured agreement and its impact on competition.” And he stresses: “This is not a green light.”
Activision and Microsoft decided at the end of last month to give themselves more time to close their merger, setting the next deadline as the October 18.
