After announcing the initial deal back in January of 2022, and going through the court hearings from the Federal Trade Commission, and Sony's CEO Jim Ryan combating the purchase, Microsoft is close to crossing the finish line with buying Activision Blizzard. Their final hurdle was the UK Competition & Markets Authority and their concerns with the grasp on cloud gaming, in which Microsoft restructured their arrangement and sold Activision's cloud gaming technology to Ubisoft. 

According to a report in The New York Times, the British CMA states that Microsoft's efforts "substantially addresses" any of the remaining anti-trust concerns, after initially blocking the deal. A final approval is still on the horizon for this $69 billion dollar acquisition of the two mega-companies, but this almost solidifies it finally going through.

“Microsoft was very strategic in its approach in how it played the whole process from beginning to end,” spoke professor of competition of law and economics at Queen Mary, University of London Ionnias Kokkoris. With Microsoft's history of anti-trust issues throughout the 90's (the 1994 case of United States v Microsoft, involving an attempt at monopolizing PC operating systems), it's considered quite the revelation to see them go through these lengths to secure this purchase. 

SOURCE: The New York Times, Justice.gov