"It is necessary to maintain the status quo" while the court considers a longer-term injunction on the purchase, as requested by Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulators, according to Judge Edward Davila's ruling.
According to the ruling, a hearing to hear evidence in the case was scheduled for June 22 and 23 in the federal court in San Francisco.
The decision came a day after the FTC requested that a federal court stop Microsoft from completing its massive acquisition of Activision Blizzard while it considered regulatory action.
The regulator stated in the filing that "a preliminary injunction is necessary to... prevent interim harm" while the FTC investigates whether "the proposed acquisition violates US antitrust law."
Tuesday's decision bars Microsoft from pushing ahead with the arrangement under the steady gaze of the court chooses whether to give a primer directive looked for by controllers.
The goal of the US government's request for the preliminary injunction at the Northern California District Court was to prevent the businesses from concluding the deal by the July 18 deadline.
A restraining order would prevent the agreement from being implemented before the FTC hearing on the deal's merits takes place in August.
The California judge would have to consent to stop the arrangement in the wake of hearing contentions by the FTC on why the buyout is unlawful and from Microsoft on why it ought to go for it.
Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, stated on Monday, "We welcome the opportunity to present our case in federal court."
"We honestly think speeding up the legitimate cycle in the US will at last carry more decision and rivalry to the market," he added.
Microsoft, which owns the Xbox console, made an offer to buy Activision Blizzard at the beginning of the previous year with the intention of creating the world's third-largest gaming company in terms of revenue, behind Sony and Tencent in China.
The deal has been approved by the European Union, but Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) blocked it in April on the grounds that it would hurt cloud gaming competition.
Concerns that the deal with Activision Blizzard, the company behind the well-known "Call of Duty" game, would stifle competition led the FTC to file a lawsuit in December to stop it.
The controller is driven by Lina Khan, an antitrust scholastic who had been a promoter of separating the greatest tech firms before she was assigned by President Joe Biden to the gig in 2021.
The FTC has investigated Amazon, and Khan has accused Meta, Facebook's parent company, of stifling competition by buying startups.
The US Branch of Equity, in the mean time, has recorded claims contending that Google has committed antitrust infringement in web-based search as well as in promoting.