---
title: "Microsoft → Activision Blizzard"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/microsoft-buy-activision-blizzard-2022"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "2022"
author: "Ihor Vlasov"
reviewed: "2026-09-20"
---

# 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.

- **Acquirer:** Microsoft (United States)
- **Target:** Activision Blizzard (United States)
- **Value:** $68.7B
- **Announced:** January 2022
- **Completed:** October 2023
- **Sector:** Technology
- **Deal type:** acquisition

## 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.

— Ihor Vlasov, M&A FinTech Expert. Last reviewed 2026-09-20. https://mahouse.world/authors/ihor-vlasov