The winners and losers from the $69bn Microsoft-Activision mega-deal

THE GAME is on. Or so ruled an American appeals court on July 14th when it threw out another effort by the Federal Trade Commission to block Microsoft’s $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a games developer, which a federal judge had cleared three days earlier. A few days later Sony and Microsoft agreed to keep “Call of Duty”, Activision’s hit first-person shooter, on Sony’s PlayStation console, increasing the pressure on Britain’s trustbuster, the last holdout, to approve the merger.Microsoft’s truce with Sony follows similar agreements with Nintendo, another Japanese gaming company, and Nvidia, an American chipmaker which also owns a cloud-based gaming service. It allays Sony’s fear that it would be cut off from “Call of Duty”, which reportedly generated $1.5bn in revenues for Sony in 2021. However, it is not a clear-cut victory for the PlayStation-maker. Its arrangement with Microsoft is limited to “Call of Duty”, and does not extend to Activision’s other blockbusters, such as World of Warcraft.