• The European Commission has approved Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion.
• After hearing about Microsoft’s commitments to cloud gaming, EU regulators are satisfied that the deal is not anti-competitive in nature.
• Regulators in the UK and US are still opposed to the deal, but it remains to be seen what will happen in those regions.

The ongoing saga that is Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard continues to drag on, as this week regulators in the EU have approved the deal. This follows the decision made by UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) only a few weeks ago, which sought to prevent the deal from happening.

As such, the two major markets opposed to this deal remain the UK and the US, with the latter’s Federal Trade Commission looking to block the deal via legal action.

While it remains to be seen what happens in those key regions, EU regulators were seemingly convinced by the commitments that Microsoft said it would be making as regards cloud gaming, which has proved a sticking point for watchdogs in other parts of the globe.

“The approval is conditional on full compliance with the commitments offered by Microsoft. The commitments fully address the competition concerns identified by the Commission and represent a significant improvement for cloud gaming as compared to the current situation,” the European Commission noted in a statement.

Having identified issues around cloud gaming, the Commission asked Microsoft how it would remedy the situation. In response the company outlined the following licensing commitments, which would be applicable over a 10-year period:

• “A free license to consumers in the EEA (European Economic Area) that would allow them to stream, via any cloud game streaming services of their choice, all current and future Activision Blizzard PC and console games for which they have a license.
• A corresponding free license to cloud game streaming service providers to allow EEA-based gamers to stream any Activision Blizzard’s PC and console games.”

Microsoft has made similar commitments when it comes to appeasing regulators, particularly when it comes to Call of Duty titles that Activision Blizzard publishes, which appear to be the IP that all parties are most concerned about.

To that end it announced a 10-year partnership with Nintendo on CoD titles should the deal come to fruition.

Whether a decade-long commitment is enough to appease other regulators is unclear, but for now, Microsoft’s deal appears to gathering more momentum. Either way this saga is far from over.