Saudi Arabia has change into the primary nation on the planet to greenlight Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The nation’s Common Authority for Competitors (GAC) tweeted Sunday that it had no objection to the completion of the “strategy of financial focus” between the 2 corporations, making it the primary regulatory hurdle Microsoft has cleared in its quest to amass Activision.
تعلن #الهيئة_العامة_للمنافسة عن عدم ممانعتها من إتمام عملية التركز الاقتصادي بين:-مايكروسوفت كوربوريشن-أكتيفيجن بليزارد إنك pic.twitter.com/lo5scC3F7kAugust 21, 2022
The GAC did not go into nice element about the way it scrutinised the acquisition, however it’s probably not a shock that they’ve waved it by. Saudi Arabia’s Imaginative and prescient 2030 plan goals to diversify the nation’s financial system and wean it off its dependency on its unthinkably big reserves of oil, and investments within the tech sector and videogames are an enormous a part of that plan. In recent times, Saudi Arabia has been doling out billions of {dollars} in investments to the likes of the Embracer Group (opens in new tab), EA, Take-Two and, sure, Activision Blizzard (opens in new tab).
Due to Saudi Arabia’s appalling human rights file, each a kind of investments has been accompanied by some measure of controversy. Nonetheless, monumental video games corporations proceed to just accept Saudi billions, and the presence of the Home of Saud within the video games trade as a complete continues to develop (opens in new tab) due to it.
The Saudi authorities says it expects the video games trade to make up about 1% of its financial system—for a price of round $21 billion (opens in new tab)—by 2030. For that to be doable, Saudi Arabia must be an interesting place for videogame massive enterprise to do enterprise. Authorising the Microsoft/Activision deal so shortly sends the bigger message that Saudi Arabia needs to be sending proper now. Throwing up any obstacles would have had the precise reverse impact: indicating to the video games trade that doing enterprise within the nation comes second to navigating the whims of its princes.
Microsoft nonetheless has loads of regulators it must persuade earlier than the Activision deal can undergo, though it does not appear doubtless it will run into an excessive amount of bother. Whereas Sony is perhaps complaining to Brazilian regulators in regards to the fallout of creating Name of Responsibility an Xbox-exclusive, it is unlikely anybody will wish to rock the boat an excessive amount of. It is not simply Saudi Arabia that wishes to remain engaging to massive enterprise, in any case.
