UK’s antitrust watchdog investigating Microsoft and Activision megadeal

Microsoft will have to satisfy more than just the to complete its to buy Activision Blizzard. On Wednesday, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority it would investigate the proposed merger. The watchdog says it seeks to determine whether the agreement would create a “substantial lessening of competition” within the UK. The CMA could announce a decision on whether it will move forward with a probe as early as September 1st. With today’s announcement, the public has until July 20th to submit comment.

Microsoft was most likely ready for the deal to be intensely scrutinized, and in recent months it has made moves seemingly designed to placate regulators. In June, for instance, the company announced a with the Communications Workers of America, the organization that seeks to represent the quality assurance workers who recently at Activision’s Raven Software studio. Just how effective such gestures will be is hard to say. At the start of the year, NVIDIA abandoned its proposed $40 billion deal to buy chip designer ARM after the FTC . At the time, the agency called the outcome “signifcant” because it represented “the first abandonment of a litigated vertical merger in many years.”