Microsoft's Activision deal has a 70% chance of being approved by the FTC, says former chairman

There's 70% chance that the Microsoft Activision deal will be approved by the FTC, the former chairman has predicted.

Following the news that the Federal Trade Commission in the US was likely to file an antitrust lawsuit to stop the Microsoft-Activision deal, a new article by The New York Post has instead indicated that the deal is more likely to go ahead than was previously thought. According to the FTC's former chairman William Kovacic, the almost $70 million deal has a 70% chance of being accepted, due to the current "rift" at the FTC.

The New York Post story reveals that the Microsoft Activision deal has caused a division with the current chair Lina Khan supposedly pushing to block the deal from going ahead. Half of the people in the four-member panel are understood to have shown support for Microsoft, including Republican commissioner Christine Wilson and at least one of the panel's three Democratic commissioners.

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Kovacic has said to The New York Post that if Microsoft was to propose "a package of solutions" for all of the FTC's concerns, "the folks at the FTC are being very unreasonable if they don't take it." It's likely that Microsoft and Activision will do everything they can to see this deal through, especially considering that just recently an Activision Blizzard exec said they "won't hesitate to fight" any challenges to Microsoft's acquisition.

Despite all of this, Microsoft appears to still be fairly confident about its Activision deal. A few months prior to this, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company still feels "very, very confident" about the deal being approved, despite the pushback from not only the FTC but also the UK's Competition and Markets Authority. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick also feels similarly, recently stating that he's confident the acquisition will close by June 2023.

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.