Nearly four and a half years after Microsoft first announced its intent to buy Activision Blizzard, the legal chapter is officially closed. According to Game File, Microsoft reached a $250 million settlement on May 22 with AP7 (Sjunde AP-Fonden), a Swedish pension fund that had filed a class action lawsuit against Microsoft back in 2022.
The $69B deal is now settled
What AP7 was actually suing for
AP7's lawsuit argued that shareholders who held Activision stock between January 2022 and October 2023 were owed more money. Had the fund won, Microsoft would have been on the hook for an additional 30 cents per share to those investors. That might sound modest per share, but across the full Activision shareholder base over that window, the exposure was significant.
The settlement documentation is blunt about Microsoft's motivation. AP7's official filing states that "Microsoft is entering into this Stipulation solely to avoid the burden, expense, and distraction of continued litigation." In other words, this was a pragmatic exit, not an admission of wrongdoing.
The long road from announcement to resolution
Here's the thing: the Activision Blizzard acquisition was never a clean deal. From the moment Microsoft announced the $69 billion purchase in January 2022, it triggered regulatory and legal scrutiny across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.
The FTC mounted a serious legal challenge, attempting to block the merger entirely. Microsoft had to negotiate a string of concessions before regulators would sign off, including guarantees around Activision titles remaining available on rival platforms and through cloud gaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now. The deal finally closed in October 2023, but that was far from the finish line.
Post-acquisition, Xbox faced a turbulent period. Multiple rounds of layoffs hit studios across the Activision Blizzard umbrella. The financial weight of the acquisition contributed to some genuinely controversial decisions, including abandoning platform exclusivity for titles like Starfield and Hi-Fi Rush, and a significant Xbox Game Pass price increase that drew real backlash from subscribers.
The AP7 settlement is the final known legal challenge tied to the Activision Blizzard acquisition. No further active lawsuits related to the deal have been reported as of May 2026.
Xbox under new leadership, finally moving forward
The timing of this settlement lands in an interesting spot for Xbox. Earlier this year, Phil Spencer stepped down as Microsoft Gaming CEO, with Asha Sharma taking over. Sharma has already made her presence felt, including a controversial decision to reduce Game Pass pricing by removing day-one access to future Call of Duty titles from the subscription.
Whether that trade-off pays off long-term is still an open question. But the settlement with AP7 does remove the last legal overhang from an acquisition that reshaped the gaming industry and cost Microsoft far more than the purchase price in regulatory concessions, management bandwidth, and reputational capital.
Game Pass pricing shifted under Sharma
For players, the practical impact of the acquisition has been mixed at best. Call of Duty stayed multiplatform. Overwatch and Diablo kept their cross-platform presence. But the studio layoffs affected real development teams, and the post-acquisition turbulence left Xbox's first-party pipeline looking thinner than many expected when the deal was first announced.
If you want to stay across what Xbox's restructured library actually looks like right now, the game reviews section has solid coverage of recent first-party and Activision Blizzard releases. For players trying to navigate what's still on Game Pass versus what's been removed, the gaming guides hub is worth bookmarking as the lineup continues to shift under Sharma's new direction.
