The drama that is the Xbox Activision/Blizzard/King deal has now ended. Xbox has now come on top and defeated FTC and the rest. Xbox posted that the deal is done, and Activision, Blizzard and King are now part of the Xbox and Phil Spencer Kingdom. This has been a year in the making! 

This all started back on January 18 of 2022, Xbox stated on a blog post that shook the huge industry. They announced that they would be buying Activision. At the time no one thought this was even a consideration. However, after the years of all the Activision and Blizzard scandals, this started to make a lot more sense. This was on top of the allegations of Sony and buying exclusives to keep them off Xbox and their game pass platform. 

This deal was meant with tons of backlash but none greater than the industry leaders themselves, Sony. Sony decided that if Xbox would be buying one the biggest publishers, then they would try to stop but all means necessary. Sony was going around to the United States’ Federal Trade Commission (FTC), European Union, and UK’s Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) and others and voicing their opinions on the matter. Their main argument was that this would create an uneven battleground due to the elephant in the room, Call of Duty. They argued that if Microsoft owned the right to Call of Duty and made its platform exclusive it would get rid of all competition. Sony would even name-dropped Nintendo in their arguments. 

Because of all the arguing that Sony was doing it started to look like Xbox was going to out of luck on acquiring Activision. Then like a shining waypoint beacon the FTC agreed with Xbox. All that was left was the people at the CMA. Phil Spencer at this time had a very tall order ahead of him to convince them that this would be an exciting time for gaming. Xbox argued that if they acquired Activision, they would bring COD and many more to all platforms including Nintendo, Nivida, Steam, and many others.  

However, things even started to look worse when out of nowhere the FTC started to come back into the picture with anti-consumer arguments. It got to the point where people were getting tired of hearing about the deal. Many even started to say that Xbox should stop and give up on their endeavor. The fight continues and out of nowhere, Xbox sent out a message on X (formerly known as Twitter) saying, “Today is a historic moment. We are excited to announce that the world-renowned franchises and talented people at Activision will be joining Team Xbox!”.  

Which leads us to where we are right now. Only the future will show what they have instore for Activision and all these beloved franchises. Hopefully we do not get a repeat of Rare, I would hate to see Crash, Spyro, and many more to be never heard of again. 

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