A merger closed a year after the FTC moved to block it

The record

On 18 January 2022, Microsoft announced an agreement to acquire Activision Blizzard, the publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush, in an all-cash deal at $95.00 per share, a transaction Microsoft's own announcement valued at $68.7 billion inclusive of Activision Blizzard's net cash. The companies expected the deal to close in Microsoft's 2023 fiscal year, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. Almost eleven months later, on 8 December 2022, the Federal Trade Commission issued an administrative complaint seeking to block the acquisition. The FTC's own press release describes a $69 billion deal and a 3-1 Commission vote to issue the complaint, with Commissioner Christine S. Wilson dissenting. The deal nonetheless closed on 13 October 2023, as Microsoft's own closing announcement states.

What the documents establish

Microsoft's January 2022 release and its October 2023 closing post are both statements by an interested party about its own transaction, and each is treated here as evidence only of what the company announced and when. The FTC's press release documents a separate legal fact: an administrative complaint is not a finding of liability. As the release itself explains, the Commission issues such a complaint when it has 'reason to believe' the law has been or is being violated, which opens a proceeding before an administrative law judge rather than resolving one. The FTC's theory, as stated in its own release, was that control over Activision's franchises would let Microsoft withhold or degrade content for rival consoles and cloud services, citing Microsoft's prior handling of Bethesda titles as precedent for that concern. Nothing in the two Microsoft statements addresses that theory; nothing in the FTC release addresses whether the underlying transaction terms changed between announcement and close. Read together, the record shows an unresolved administrative complaint sitting alongside a transaction that closed on its original cash terms.

The operating read

This is an editorial reading, not a conclusion drawn from a court ruling: a regulator's complaint and a deal's closing are not the same event, and a filing history can show both in progress at once without either one overriding the other on paper. An operator evaluating a competitor's or partner's pending acquisition should track the administrative docket and the closing announcement as separate threads, since a still-open proceeding can outlast the transaction it targeted. The size of a Commission vote, here 3-1, is itself a documented fact worth noting when assessing how contested a challenge was internally.

What to check before you decide

Before treating any large acquisition as settled law on antitrust risk, a founder or operator should check the following against primary filings.

• Has the regulator's proceeding been resolved, dismissed, or left open after closing?
• Do the closing terms match the originally announced price and structure?
• What specific conduct, rather than market share alone, does the complaint allege?

The Microsoft-Activision record is a reminder that a merger's completion date and a regulator's complaint date can both be true at once, and that only the underlying documents, not the headline outcome, show which commitments were actually tested.