EU Approves Microsoft's Acquisition of Activision Blizzard

The European Union agreed to let Microsoft Corp. buy Activision Blizzard Inc. for $69 billion. This puts the EU at odds with the UK and the US. The European Commission said that its own research showed that the deal wouldn't hurt competition. This was after Microsoft promised to let cloud rivals offer big games like Call of Duty on their own platforms for 10 years.

Now that the deal has been approved, it will depend on whether the company can win legal challenges in the US and UK. This is going to be a hard job. EU antitrust boss Margrethe Vestager said Monday that the deal was "pro-competitive" and that it would "kickstart" the cloud streaming market, which is only 1% to 3% of the whole game market.

The EU's approval goes against the decisions of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which last month showed how it has become a global watchdog since Brexit, and the US Federal Trade Commission, which tried to stop the deal last year.

Vestager from the EU said that EU and UK officials came to different opinions about how quickly the cloud gaming market would grow in the future. "We agree that the market for cloud streaming is a good one. We might have different ideas about how fast it will grow," Vestager said, adding that the EU thinks cloud gaming will take longer to grow than it will in the UK.