Over six months have passed since Microsoft announced their intent to buy Activision Blizzard, in a move that shocked most gamers back in January (less than a year after they acquired Bethesda/ZeniMax). It is the by far biggest take-over in the video game industry - bigger than the ten next most expensive acquisitions combined - and does of course need to be approved from a whole lot of instances in various markets.
Therefore this deal isn't expected to be finalised until mid-2023, but at least it is moving forward. There has been a lot of interesting information leaking from the case via the Brazilian Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), like Sony trying to block games from being released on Game Pass by paying publishers money to withhold their titles from the service, and now we've got another sign of life from this deal as Saudi Arabia has now become the first market to approve Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard.
The country's General Authority for Competition tweets (translated with Bing) that it does "not mind the completion of the process of economic concentration between" the two companies. We will of course follow this interesting case going forward as more and more countries delivers their decision on something that undoubtedly will change the video game landscape quite a lot in the end.
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