After a year and a half of meetings, negotiations, deadlocks and even a media trial, it seems that the deal to buy Activision Blizzard King from Microsoft, a merger worth $68.7 billion, is very close to being finalised in favour of the Xbox owner. The only remaining stumbling block is the British CMA, but they may now have reached an agreement, even if they have had to sacrifice market share.
According to a report from The Verge, Microsoft plans to sell its UK-wide cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft. The sale is a major restructuring of Microsoft's plans.
"To address concerns about the impact of the proposed acquisition on cloud game streaming raised by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, we are restructuring the transaction to acquire a smaller set of rights," says Microsoft president Brad Smith. "This includes executing an agreement effective at the closing of our merger that transfers the cloud streaming rights to all current and new Activision Blizzard PC and console games released over the next 15 years to Ubisoft Entertainment SA, a leading global games publisher. The rights will be in perpetuity."
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In this way, Microsoft clears up doubts about the British monopoly on cloud gaming, and at the same time provides a great opportunity for Ubisoft to grow in this segment. Microsoft will no longer be able to exclusively launch its new games only on the Xbox ecosystem, and Ubisoft "will be able to offer Activision Blizzard games to cloud gaming services running non-Windows operating systems".