Microsoft may have closed the deal on the Activision Blizzard King buyout last October, but that doesn’t mean the battle is completely over for them, as the FTC continues to throw every attempt to undo the merger, with the latest claiming that Microsoft misled courts on how Activision would continue operations post-merger.

The news comes from a letter (spotted by Gamesfray on X, via Techraptor) sent by the FTC today claiming that the recent layoffs at Microsoft, which saw many from the Activision Blizzard King side lose their jobs, contradicting what Microsoft said during the trial.

“The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) writes to notify the Court of Microsoft’s publicly reported plan to eliminate 1,900 jobs in its video game division.” The letter writes, “This newly-revealed information contradicts Microsoft’s representations in this proceeding, which seeks to temporarily pause Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, pending the FTC’s evaluation of the merger’s antitrust merits. Microsoft represented to this Court that “the post-merger company will be structured and operated in a way that would readily enable Microsoft to divest any or all of the Activision businesses as robust market participants in the unlikely event that such a divestiture is ordered.” Further, Microsoft argued that the principal public equity that would be served by an injunction—“to maintain the pre-merger status quo”—is “not implicated by Microsoft’s vertical acquisition of Activision, which Microsoft intends to operate as a limited-integration studio.” Microsoft claimed that the public equity favoring an injunction “is more acutely implicated in horizontal mergers, where competing entities integrate their operations and, in the process, often eliminate redundancies.”

This is the latest attempt by the FTC to block, or rather, reverse, the deal. Though the deal has been closed, that does not mean that Microsoft is safe from it potentially being undone, something that the FTC has been pursuing since they lost in court last year.

Whether they end up succeeding or failing is up to the courts to decide. At the moment, the letter has yet to receive any response from the courts or Microsoft. We’ll continue to keep you updated as the story continues to develop.

In other Microsoft news, Xbox boss Phil Spencer is holding an Xbox business update next week, which we hope will address the rumors of first-party exclusive titles hitting other platforms.