The deal will close next year, hopefully towards the end of Q1.
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Will UK open investigation into Sony? All 3 items fit the bill - higher prices, lower quality and reduced choice 
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UK recent action of MS for customer will play for them.
They put the system that cancel subscription to GamePass if not launch in the past X mounth before the date required. They always agree to UK requirement and did it in the right way without any false agreement (not like Apple for example, who say yes to thing when they could not say no, but always find a way to put a worst system)
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Well, their Open App Store policy was a preemptive move against the current EU regulations (and probably USA).
MS has close contacts in the government after all. MS is western Tencent basically at this point.
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If the regulators are all wrapped up by Fall of this year, I wouldnât take that bet personally. Iâve long thought it would be finished by the end of this calendar year, at the latest. There are fewer parallels with Zenimaxâs purchase than I think people realize; ABK has a much larger M&A team than Zenimax did and has completed a lot larger acquisitions regularly, for example. With Microsoft beefing up their M&A team over the last 18 months, I donât think a linear comparison to size/value is applicable.
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Australia too!
Hope this could mean we start hearing from regulators around the world.
Team dealclosesin2022 assemble!!
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With how incompetent the UK Gov are Iâm surprised itâs only taken 6 months to start their investigation, why it takes nearly a further 2 months to decide if they want to investigate further (when itâs inevitable anyway) is ridiculous though IMO.
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Started 20th of June.
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Starting to think this deal may end up closing this year. Maybe an early Christmasâ gift.
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It would be a nice addition of games to play over the holidays!
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It all depends on Sony deal there. As Sony could probably involved into getting some COD games on PS+ Extra or whatever for example (I think they had PS+ COD give aways).
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Part of the deal was to make sure that ABK do not do anything new that can have adverse effects on MS while the merger is being investigated.
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Sony only have marketing. Which means adverts for call of duty have the PS5 as the linked platform. If it were launching on Stadia, no-one would expect Sony to call AB and say âHey, we have a marketing deal, you need to cancel the Stadia releaseâ
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New - yes. But we donât know what Sony prepared for PS+ tiers launch (granted I believe not much as launch was relatively dry)
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That is the most important take away from all of this. These reviews were always going to happen, but this is a sign the ball is rolling and you can look forward to hearing more as the year progresses.
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Backlogs. The respective government offices have them too.
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Yup now China is the only one from the big 4. (US, EU, Uk and china)
Like Brad Smith said weeks ago, they now seem to be at the âbeginning of the middleâ part of regulatory process.
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Looking at the timeline, the EU started investigating MS/Nuance about a month after the UK gave its verdict. I wouldnât be surprised if by September the EU shows up. Also this sort of alludes that no issues from the U.S/FTC and that the 30 days period had ran out.
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Do you think theres a possibility of this deal closing this year? I would say early next year at worst 