After several years of legal battle, Microsoft is set to pay a $250 million settlement to Activision-Blizzard shareholders who accused former executives at the company of rushing the acquisition and setting a lower price per share. That is according to Reuters, which reports that former Activision-Blizzard shareholders, led by Swedish pension fund Sjunde AP-Fonden, agreed to settle for $250 million with Microsoft following several years of legal battle. The accusations arose from Microsoft’s deal to acquire Activision-Blizzard for $75.4 billion in 2023 at $95 per share, in which the shareholders believe they were shortchanged by Acti-Blizz executives and Microsoft. Activision-Blizzard was valued so highly primarily due to CoD‘s immense success. Image via Activision The shareholders specifically accused former chief executive Bobby Kotick of rushing to merge the company with Microsoft to “keep his job and $400 million of change-of-control benefits.” Both Microsoft and Kotick filed counterclaims against the shareholders and Sjunde AP-Fonden, which will also reportedly be resolved by this settlement. The merge between Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft took years to pull through after severe issues with regulators domestically and abroad. The FTC sued to block the merger on anti-trust grounds, while the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority did due to concerns over cloud gaming, leading Microsoft to sell off Activision-Blizzard’s cloud rights to Ubisoft to get the green light. It remains a controversial topic in gaming, as it is the biggest merger in gaming history, though still far removed from the greatest mergers globally. 0The post Microsoft to pay $250 million settlement over ‘rushed’ Activision purchase appeared first on Destructoid.