Microsoft → Activision Blizzard

An all-cash deal at $95 a share, $68.7bn including net cash — the largest technology acquisition to date — that took 21 months to clear and closed only after Microsoft sold the cloud-streaming rights to Activision's games to Ubisoft to satisfy the UK's Competition and Markets Authority.

An all-cash deal at $95 a share that took 21 months to clear, with cloud gaming rights sold to Ubisoft to satisfy the UK CMA.

Value

$68.7B

Announced

January 2022

Completed

October 2023

Sector

Technology

Deal type

acquisition

Acquirer

Microsoft (United States)

Target

Activision Blizzard (United States)

Why it mattered

Microsoft bought Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush to become the third-largest games company by revenue and to feed its Game Pass subscription, at a 45% premium to an Activision share price depressed by a workplace-misconduct scandal. The strategic argument was content for a subscription and cloud-gaming platform; the regulatory argument became the deal.

The FTC sued to block it and lost in court in July 2023; the European Commission cleared it with licensing commitments; the CMA blocked it in April 2023 on cloud-gaming grounds, the first time a UK regulator had stopped a US technology deal of that size, then accepted a restructured transaction in which the streaming rights outside the EEA went to Ubisoft for fifteen years. The deal closed in October 2023.

What it left behind

The longest and most litigated technology merger review of its era, and the template for what followed: a reverse break fee of $3bn that Microsoft would have paid, a remedy that carved a business line out to a third party rather than a behavioural promise, and a demonstration that the UK regulator could stop a global deal alone. Every large acquisition since — Broadcom–VMware, Google–Wiz — has been timetabled and structured around it.