Starting today at 8:30 a.m. PT and over the course of the next week, executives from Microsoft and Activision Blizzard will make their way up to the 19th floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in San Francisco to try to defend the former’s whopping $68.7 billion deal for the latter.
The hearing that starts today is in advance of the formal trial slated for August. But just recently, on June 12, the Federal Trade Commission filed a separate lawsuit against Microsoft and Activision—this one trying to temporarily block the acquisition before the August trial, as the FTC asserted that Microsoft and Activision were “seriously contemplating” going ahead and closing the acquisition ahead of time, and they wanted to put a stop to it. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
And so, it all begins: Evidence will be shown, executives will speak—all a couple of months before we were initially anticipating.
The acquisition—which would be Microsoft’s largest in its nearly five-decade history—is a landmark case, for both the gaming industry as well as the rest of the market. The current administration hasn’t been afraid to throw a wrench in corporate plans to scale. It appears that Adobe’s planned $20 billion acquisition of design startup Figma is under threat from the Department of Justice, as Bloomberg reported in February (this one is apparently not looking good to the EU, either). For its part, Microsoft’s Activision deal was approved in the European Union, though it was just recently blocked in the U.K. (Microsoft is appealing).
This week, the FTC is requesting that Microsoft be frozen from acquiring any Activision stock, assets, or anything else until the FTC can more formally lay out its case.
Here are some of those scheduled to testify:
- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
- Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment
- Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard
- Amy Hood, CFO of Microsoft
- Armin Zerza, CFO of Activision Blizzard
- Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming
- Tim Stuart, CFO of Microsoft Gaming
- Matt Booty, Microsoft’s head of Xbox Game Studios
- Steve Singer of Nintendo
- Phil Eisler, Nvidia’s vice president and general manager of GeForce NOW Cloud Gaming
- Jeff Fisher, Nvidia’s senior vice president of GeForce
- Pete Hines of Microsoft subsidiary Bethesda Softworks
- Dov Zimring of Google’s Stadia
- Sarah Bond, corporate vice president of gaming ecosystem at Microsoft
- Jamie Lawyer, senior finance director at Microsoft
- Lori Wright, corporate vice president at Microsoft
There’s a lot on the agenda—and a whole lot at stake.
See you tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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Jackson Fordyce curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
