In August 2020, Microsoft announced their intent to buy ZeniMax/Bethesda. As this was the third biggest acquisition of a video game company of all time back then, it took until March 2021 before the deal was finalised after getting approved from all necessary instances.
But buying ZeniMax/Bethesda was cheap compared to Activision Blizzard with a price tag of $8.1 billion versus $68.7 billion for the latter. Therefore it takes even longer time to get everything approved this time and the deal is not expected to be done until summer of 2023. Some people have been worried about this deal and thinks it might hurt the competition in the video game space, but the Microsoft boss Satya Nadella isn't worried.
He doesn't think Microsoft has to do any concessions to get the deal done, and says in an interview with Financial Times that they will still only be the third biggest player in the video game space (after Sony and Tencent):
"At the end of the day, all the analysis here has to be done through a lens of: 'what's the category we're talking about, and market structure?. Even post this acquisition, we will be number three with sort of low-teens share [of the video games market] ... We will be a bit player in what will be a highly fragmented place."
Do you think Microsoft will get the deal with Activision Blizzard finalised as planned?