China's antitrust regulator "is holding back its required green light for mergers that involve American companies as a technology war with Washington intensifies," according to a Wall Street Journal report today. China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has asked companies seeking merger approvals to "make available in China products they sell in other countries—an attempt to counter the US's increased export controls targeting China," the report said.

"Chinese regulators recently have slowed down their merger reviews of a number of proposed acquisitions by US companies, including Intel Corp.'s $5.2 billion takeover of Israel-based Tower Semiconductor Ltd. and chip maker MaxLinear Inc.'s $3.8 billion purchase of Silicon Motion Technology of Taiwan, according to people close to the process," the WSJ wrote.

Microsoft's $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard is "subject to Beijing's lengthy merger scrutiny" because China last year "declined the companies' request to file the deal under a simplified and expedited procedure," the WSJ report said. The Microsoft/Activision deal also faces antitrust scrutiny in the UK and EU.

Report: China Increasingly Uses Merger Reviews to Make Demands of US Companies | Ars Technica

Microsoft's timing is hilarious.

Dealing with SAMR should be as simple as guaranteeing to make a new ABK publishing deal with one of the Chinese publishers like Netease (unlikely as they wanted partial IP ownership which is why the old Blizzard deal with them fell apart last year), Tencent, or Perfect World. 

There were reports weeks ago that Tencent already approves of the deal and we know they have a strong partnership with Microsoft so I'm pretty sure Tencent expects to get the ABK deal, I doubt Microsoft/Activision will go anywhere near NetEase with it after they threatened them (the fate of the deal) hence why NetEase is all of a sudden "concerned" about the deal.

Tencent is a far bigger company than NetEase and with more power so I think their support should be enough unless China gets political because of the TikTok ban. It's all meh though, I expect China to cave and I don't really think Microsoft will care about China's approval if EC/CMA approve and FTC loses in court. I don't think China has the power here, they only account for 3% of ABK's revenue and 1.8% of Microsoft's, Lol.

Someone actually from ID@Xbox hosting it.

Netease are dumb to be acting this way since Tencent are a far larger company and a direct competitor, all this will do will drive more business to Tencent.

Yeah, safe to say that Netease killed any chance of getting the ABK rights back after they asked for partial IP ownership and essentially threatened ABK to try and get the rights renewed by suggesting they would bad mouth the acquisition to SAMR if ABK didn't renew the publishing deal. Microsoft would be fools to make a new deal with Netease at this point, they will surely go with either Tencent (who hold the Chinese publishing rights to games such as League of Legends, Path of Exile, Fortnite, Rainbow Six Siege, and PUBG) or Perfect World (who holds the Chinese publishing rights to games such as Dota 2 and Counterstrike: GO).

China doing gods work, deal is dead hallelujah.

I don’t think this new issue with Chinese regulators has anything at all to do with video games or Netease, this is retaliation against the US for its current technology export restrictions

No Xbox Wire post about the ID@Xbox event yet so I wouldn't expect much...