It's been confirmed today that Activision Blizzard's stockholders have voted to approve the acquisition of the company by Microsoft, with a press release suggesting that more than 98% of the shares voted in favour of the deal.
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick described it as an "overwhelmingly supportive vote" in a statement:
“Today’s overwhelmingly supportive vote by our stockholders confirms our shared belief that, combined with Microsoft, we will be even better positioned to create great value for our players, even greater opportunities for our employees, and to continue our focus on becoming an inspiring example of a welcoming, respectful, and inclusive workplace."
The acquisition has still probably got quite a way to go until it's finalised, with the deal potentially set to complete as late of June of 2023, but this is one of the bigger hurdles it's now managed to clear.
Interestingly however, Bloomberg has been reporting today that Wall Street is "betting that the acquisition will fail", suggesting that, "investors see risk the buyout won’t close as planned", with one source suggesting this was due to "tough-talk from President Joe Biden’s antitrust enforcers".
Today's news is definitely a positive for the deal, but it seems there are still a few twists and turns to come yet...
Happy to see this? Give us your thoughts down in the comments section below.
Comments 16
Good news. This is a good thing for both Microsoft and Activision. Would be nice if it all got wrapped up early, unlikely I know.
Just make sure Bobby goes out.
I'll be shocked if this doesn't go through. Joe Biden is all talk.
One step.closer to.getting Bobby Kotick out.
It is cute Kotick thinks he's going to be around.. not that I would care if I was him though.. his buyout is like 200M or something.
What I find funnier about the antitrust guys, is that Acti on their own is a much more likely to engage in less than above board activity.
Having them assumed by another company is actually a win.
Had a feeling this would be approved. I just wish that the deal would go through sooner so we can start getting these games into gamepass.
Very difficult to find some Anti-trust regulation when there are so many other Publishers and studio's making games. Its not as if MS games are ONLY available on MS branded hardware that 'forces' people to buy as they are available 'everywhere' except Nintendo/Sony hardware who actively block them from providing a way to play 'their' games!!!
New Studio's are being formed quite regularly too. Its not as if people only have 1 choice where to play Starfield, but they'll only have 1 choice if they want to play Spider-Man!!!
In time, the whole 'platform' thing could be obsolete with all games streaming from some service based option - and MS are 'Netflix' - but that didn't stop Disney+, HBO, Amazon Prime, Apple etc all 'competing'. Steam is a 'competitor' too but MS doesn't block them from Windows..
All this talk about maybe CoD only being on Xbox - so what? it doesn't mean that the competition can't make a competitor for their platform with anyone of the 'hundreds' of other studio's around the world!!
Its completely different from nVidia trying to buy out ARM which would give them a 'big' advantage over the ONLY remaining competitor on the market. If there were only '3' companies that make and publish games (like MS, Sony and Nintendo), the nVidia equivalent would be MS buying Nintendo which would likely see Sony struggling to compete because not only have you 'reduced' the choices for the Consumer, you have also made one Company significantly bigger/better and able to control the market. Sell games/hardware cheaper to 'kill' off competition etc
Even with 50 studio's, Sony, Nintendo, Square Enix, EA, Ubisoft, Tencent, 2K, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Sega etc etc are still competing, still publishing games etc. From a Gaming perspective, the deal only makes MS '3rd' - behind TenCent and Sony!!
Some people seem to think that 'gaming' is just the 'platform' - Xbox vs Sony and scared that they might not get their 'beloved' game on their 'preferred' platform - but ignore the fact that there are LOTS of Publishers and many of them have numerous Studio's making games 'exclusively' for that Publisher. As stated, its not as if MS would have 'no' competition with this deal!
Yeah here we go, nearly there.
Need to allocate 10% for the big guy to make sure it goes through.
What "trust" is this creating. We're down to 3 mobile phone companies, and that's ok. We're down to 1 satrad, and that's dandy. We're down to a handful of meat production companies, all of them foreign owned, and most of them part of mega conglomerates that also encompass the rest of food production and that's just peachy. We were down to depending on the Russians exclusively for space transport, by decree of the government itself, until God-Emperor Musk saved us.
But two big video game entertainment publisher out of 8 plus dozens of smaller ones is suddenly a trust problem? If we're going to start calling 7 major players and a few dozen minor players a "trust" can we start talking about food, energy, material commodities, or the fact that nearly the entire electronics sector is manufactured by a single Taiwanese company and a single Korean company?
And can somebody please talk about Google and Amazon while we talk trusts?
Those Sony tears are delicious..
Great news I'm looking forward to it going through.
Hopefully it won't go ahead.
While I can’t wait to see Kotick out of there, I hate that he will be doing it with a Scrooge McDuck smile as swims in a pool of money from this deal. He’ll be laughing his way to the bank. With that said, I’m excited to see what Activision looks like under Spencer.
No surprise, this was expected, rejecting this deal was probably gonna cost the majority of shareholders (institutions) a lot of money.
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