Is this for real?
Damn that scares me quite a lot.
It is never good when huge companies are getting even bigger. We are steadily heading into territory of megacorporations one would find in cyberpunk stories.

Another article on the subject

https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/microsoft-buys-activision-blizzard-bobby-kotick-staying-as-ceo

It looks like Kotick will remain CEO.

Well, it's not like Blizzard under Activision could get any worse...

While the price may be arguably a bit too much, this is undoubtedly a good thing. Xbox is one of the more consumer-friendly AAA studios, with consistently good titles and support to smaller studios for which they publish games, whereas Activision-Blizzard is the polar opposite, lootboxes and annoying, unnecessary micro-transactions and cash-grabby annual copy-pasted games (you know which franchise I'm talking about). Not to mention the fact that their anti-employee practises with several cases of workplace harassment popping up recently.

The acquisition would put more pressure on the aforementioned issues and hopefully be rectified, with the abolishment of those features for the former and punishments to the offenders for the latter. Not to mention that the new Activision and Blizzard games will finally be out of their launcher and make its way into Steam, and hopefully the prospect of making its way to other platforms like here, GOG, and EGS.

Although I feel Zenimax is a better investment as it will most likely do more good to Xbox than Activision-Blizzard ever would, them coming under Xbox's belt will certainly do no harm.

TL;DR: It's like sitting a cold-blooded murderer in a room with an honest priest (and a couple armed guards).

I suppose this is good news? Blizzard's already at the bottom of the barrel for me, ever since the quadruple whammy of the real-money auction house in D3, no offline mode for D3 on PC, Diablo Immortal and the Blitzchung incident. So no way but up I guess/hope.

If I had to guess, I'd assume Bobby will remain until the merge ins't closed. Once that's done, he'll leave.
Microsoft even says this on their announcement article:

"Until this transaction closes, Activision Blizzard and Microsoft Gaming will continue to operate independently. Once the deal is complete, the Activision Blizzard business will report to me as CEO, Microsoft Gaming."

So Phill Spencer will be Activision Blizzard's CEO, so no need to Bobby still be around. And hopefully that's be the case. And hopefully, with this acquisition, there'll be a cleaning up on the inside related to these latest Activision scandals

You're thinking in general marketplace. I'm thinking in specific marketplaces. Specifically the MMORPG market. Microsoft currently owns Elder Scrolls Online. With their purchase of Acti-Blizz, they'd also own WoW. That would mean they own two of the biggest three MMORPGS, which is monopolistic.

Don't post here often, but as a old-blizz fan, this is pretty big. Time for some takes:

1) I really hope they merge the battle.net client and Xbox app, hopefully rolling most of the features of the battle.net client into place because the Xbox app is a broken mess a lot of the time.
(I just loaded up the Xbox App and it gave me a pop up asking "Do you like the Xbox app", LOL. Hopefully there's a willingness here to improve, but unprompted feedback pop ups piss me off, so even by its nature that's a 'no' )

2) Given their behavior trend, I doubt any new games from Acti-Blizz come to GOG, which is a big shame. There's still a ton of games I'd like to see on GOG that were published by Activision (Forgive me I don't know the copyright status of these, but games like Heavy Gear, Mechwarrior 2, Heretic II, old Tony Hawk games). While it hasn't happened yet that I'm aware of, it would suck if they pulled the older Blizz games from GOG.

3) I doubt any monopoly rules come into play. I don't think a game being an MMO makes it a special competitive market, and besides there's plenty of MMORPGs like FFXIV, New World, Everquest, etc. This doesn't introduce anything on the console market because Activision doesn't have a console. This merger still doesn't make them bigger than Sony or Tencent.

4) Censorship will be a lot more streamlined. I fear for the old games. It's dangerous how retroactive censorship has become thanks to digital distribution. We've seen how they were able to destroy Warcraft III. Just issue an update to your 20+ year old game and suddenly everything 'naughty' has been rinsed away. Now, instead of just Activision's censors meddling with the old guard, you get the giant corporate machine that is Microsoft to do it, on top.

Not that Activision-Blizzard isn't a shitshow (and has been for well over a decade), but Microsoft is where game studios go to die. Microsoft just doesn't get or do gaming, despite all their acquisitions in the space.

Anyone got a huge list of what IP's Activision-Blizzard holds and also what they hold licenses-usage for?

We all know the obvious ones (WarCraft, StarCraft, Diablo, COD)...
But...what about other stuff like Prototype IP? Any Sierra games still? Arcanum? Singularity?

I wouldnt buy activision bliz , way overpriced for what they produce lately
bliz part is total fail
activision part is fail too at least they can make money

Tencent should have bought these

and still nobody is interested in cdpr :(

dont think so , probably everything will be bent to fit under xbox umbrella

There will be "cleaning up", all right.
You forgot about King part. It probably makes more money than Blizzard and Activision combined.
No. I don't want to see what they'll twist Arcanum to fit current politics.
You mean with a person in charge, who literally said that there will be no free speech on the Microsoft platform(s)?

Looks like the fears of all the people in the 90's that MS would become a super-monopoly are being belatedly realized.

Edit: But honestly, MS is the most benign of the tech giants, we're lucky it isn't Facebook or Twitter buying up developers,