Ubisoft Financial News

Microsoft has submitted a new proposal to Britain's competition regulator for the acquisition of video gaming giant Activision Blizzard, the watchdog said Tuesday, after a previous version of the deal was blocked. Xbox-owner Microsoft launched a bid for Activision Blizzard early last year, seeking to establish the world's third biggest gaming firm by revenue after China's Tencent and Japan's PlayStation maker Sony. But the $69 billion deal for the purchase of the owner of game titles including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush has faced significant scrutiny by regulators. Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it has «opened a new phase 1 investigation into a new, restructured deal by Microsoft to buy Activision». It added that the new deal follows confirmation by the regulator that «the original deal would be blocked to protect innovation and choice in cloud gaming». Under the new proposed deal «Microsoft will not acquire cloud rights for existing Activision PC and console games, or for new games released by Activision during the next 15 years (this excludes the European Economic Area),» the CMA said. Instead these rights will be divested to French game developer Ubisoft Entertainment prior to Microsoft's acquisition of Activision, according to the CMA. Ubisoft will in particular have «the ability to supply Activision's gaming content to all cloud gaming service providers (including to Microsoft itself)». «This will allow gamers to access Activision's games in different ways, including through cloud-based multigame subscription services,» Sarah Cardell, the CMA chief executive, said. — Confidence — Cardell added that «this is not a green light». «Our goal has not changed — any future

Microsoft Corp.'s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc., following a substantial alteration to the proposed merger by the tech giant. This move, as reported by Bloomberg effectively resets the acquisition process to its initial stages, as announced by the country's antitrust watchdog on Tuesday. In an uncommon development, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) declared that it was reevaluating Microsoft's offer after the company indicated its intention to sell the rights of all present and future Activision games for the next 15 years to Ubisoft Entertainment SA.

Please note that some release dates are yet to be officially confirmed and may change. One notable movie, «Damsel,» starring Millie Bobby Brown, originally set for October 13th, has been postponed.

Massive Entertainment has been at the helm of Ubisoft's ambitious open-world Star Wars project, known as "Star Wars Outlaws," which was officially revealed during the Xbox Summer Games Fest 2023. Initially codenamed «Project Helix,» the game has undergone playtesting and is set in the beloved Star Wars universe.

Ubisoft, maker of the blockbuster "Assassin's Creed" franchise, on Thursday posted a 8.7% decline in net bookings in its first quarter, blaming a lack of new games releases. «It is explained quite simply by the fact that we did not launch a game this trimester,» finance chief Frederick Duguet told journalists in a call, adding that Ubisoft had been focused on new versions of older games.

Square Enix, the Japanese game developer behind the beloved Final Fantasy franchise has signed on as a node validator for blockchain gaming project Oasys, with the duo also teaming up to create blockchain games.

Yves Guillemot, the CEO of French gaming giant Ubisoft appears to have cooled the rhetoric behind the company’s NFT gaming project Quartz, noting in a recent interview that it was merely in “research mode” concerning Web3 tech integrations.

Spain has announced that influencers who advertise cryptocurrency in the country, will need to include warnings and disclose potential risks in their promotional material. This rule applies to any influencer with 100,000 followers on more.

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Rennis, France-based Ubisoft, a video game developer and publisher launches a platform called «Digits» on its own Ubisoft Quartz NFT platform, stepping into the field of encrypted NFT.