Microsoft is formally seeking compromise with the European Union over its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, having now offered a series of remedies to Brussels' antitrust authorities in a bid to win its approval of the transaction. According to previous reports, Microsoft has been preparing an EU concession package concerning the deal as early as November 2022.
Industry watchers have hence been predicting this turn of events for a while now, and though the EU hasn't yet mounted significant opposition to the deal, that's not to say the newly proposed remedies are just a formality. Not least because the European Commission started investigating Microsoft's Activision Blizzard takeover in late 2022, citing antitrust concerns.
Microsoft has now moved to alleviate those reservations with a formal concession package, Reuters reports, citing confirmation from a company spokesperson and a separate European Commission filing dated March 17. The public docket for the case does not yet reflect this development, so the actual contents of the remedies that Microsoft proposed to the EU will likely remain unclear until at least next week. There's no uncertainty about the regulator's next step, however, with Brussels confirming it will now seek feedback from both consumers and Xbox rivals prior to making a ruling on the proposed merger. The current provisional deadline attached to the case is May 22, though that date has already been pushed back twice, each time by 10 days.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority recently found that half of Xbox rivals are concerned about the Activision Blizzard deal, so bar any major changes of heart, that's presumably what the EU will conclude as well. The consumer feedback that Brussels will soon start soliciting is less predictable, but also not as likely to influence this type of decision.
The $69 billion acquisition recently won an unlikely advocate in CWA, one of the largest North American unions that previously sued Activision Blizzard for union-busting but supported the Microsoft takeover in a February open letter to the EU, positing the deal would positively impact labor markets all over the world. Those lobbying efforts are unlikely to directly impact Brussels' ruling on the matter, primarily because its ongoing probe is solely focused on determining whether owning the Call of Duty maker would give Xbox too much power at the intersection of video game publishers and console manufacturers.
The Activision Blizzard deal, which also includes mobile gaming giant King, is Microsoft's tenth acquisition scrutinized by the European Commission to date. Nine of those were approved, whereas the remaining transaction was a joint bid with Time Warner for a controlling stake in digital rights management company ContentGuard that both companies abandoned after Thomson Corporation beat them to the punch in 2005. So, while neither EU legislators nor regulators are formally bound by precedents akin to the U.S. common law system, Microsoft's track record with getting its M&A activities over the finish line on the Old Continent is pretty impeccable.
Source: Reuters, European Commission