Right on schedule and after a rocky start, Microsoft has closed the $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard that regulators in the U.S. and UK had challenged. Big Tech is celebrating the move as a signal that their cash reserves can still be used to target expansion. The deal is consumer tech’s largest since AOL purchased Time Warner in a 2000 deal valued at more than twice that. Until now, Microsoft’s games unit, built around Xbox, has been a modest part of the company’s immense portfolio — representing just over 7 percent of total sales, or revenue of about $15 billion.

Microsoft’s games division grew one percent in the most recent quarter. That could change as Microsoft welcomes content including “Call of Duty,” “World of Warcraft” and “Candy Crush” into the fold.

Closing the deal is “a win for [Microsoft’s] Xbox strategy,” NYU Stern School of Business games expert Joost van Dreunen told The New York Times, adding that it is “‘perhaps more importantly, a win for Microsoft as a company’ because it culminates a years-long effort to improve its relationship among regulators and in Washington.”

“Microsoft’s Activision acquisition is a clear signal” to governments around the world that Big Tech is largely immune to their attempts to “curb their power, their growth or their ability to ink megadeals,” NYT writes, adding that “the deal could provide a blueprint” for others “on how to successfully fend off the intervention of regulators.”

The $69 billion price, according to CNBC, is “an extraordinary amount of money for Microsoft, whose core business is not gaming.” It’s a bet Microsoft’s highest-ranking managers, led by Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, decided to make “rather than ceding the market” to contenders in the gaming space, CNBC writes in a deep dive into Spencer’s history.

The global regulatory challenges were part of a larger effort “to take action against tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta,” NYT suggests, noting that “the Federal Trade Commission tried to stop Meta from buying a startup that makes a virtual reality fitness game,” while the Justice Department “last year sued to stop a deal for a health tech company that it said would give one of the nation’s largest insurers data about its competitors.”

European regulators greenlit the Microsoft-Activision deal in May, while the FTC withdrew its case in July after losing an early round.