The arrival of Activision Blizzard to the Xbox family promises to be one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of technology companies. Microsoft has dealt a real blow to the table in the recent non-stop acquisitions that we have been experiencing in recent years among the giants of the industry and, if everything goes ahead (and the latest updates seem to suggest that it will), things will to change a lot for Microsoft and for Xbox Game Pass, adding one of the most successful and multifaceted companies in the video game scene to its catalog.
However, there has been a lot of talk about what Microsoft can achieve thanks to Activision Blizzard, but perhaps it is also interesting to consider, what can bring to Activision Blizzard being bought by Microsoft?
It is not at all a secret the current situation that the creator of Call of Duty is going through, nor the other side of it, Blizzard, creator of franchises as huge as Diablo and World of Warcraft. Of course, although it seems that the corporation has taken some steps to try to find solutions to the problems that plague its workers, the acquisition by Microsoft has been seen as a ray of hope among those who work within the company. Microsoft is broadly seen as a place with good working conditions, including benefits such as good health insurance that they may be able to benefit from after the acquisition.
Another problem that has affected many of Activision Blizzard’s internal studios has been the massive callofdutization within them, where there are fewer and fewer studios with the freedom to work on “something” original, dragged down by massive and guaranteed success. of Call of Duty, now expanded even more by Warzone, a Battle Royale that brings a huge continuous flow of money to the company, but that also requires uninterrupted support to incorporate new content into the competitive market of games as a service (or GAAS).
The model currently pursued by Microsoft, focused on Xbox Game Pass, seeks more variety of content and offers greater economic security, without the need to aim for the continuous launch of new Call of Duty. This aspect could provide the possibility of freeing many studios, such as Toys for Bob (which was responsible for Crash Bandicoot 4 and Spyro Reignited Trilogy), to develop new platform games, a genre that has largely disappeared in recent years.
And of course, this last point joins another very important one: Activision Blizzard has a huge and varied number of video game sagas that are, for the most part, in a long dream, since as we have explained before the company is practically entirely focused on developing new Call of Duty, with the sole exception of Blizzard, who don’t release many new games either. The need for a varied catalog within Xbox Game Pass can be a great incentive to bring many of those disappeared IPs back to lifeand who knows, maybe even the arrival of a new Spyro, something that seemed practically guaranteed after the success of his remastered trilogy, but unlike Crash Bandicoot, it has never ended up becoming a reality, and with the fall of Toys for Bob the vortex of the Call of Duty was already practically lost.
What can bring to Activision Blizzard being bought by Microsoft?
In short, there is a lot for Activision Blizzard to gain, potentially, at the level of variety of games and level of work quality among its ranks. On the part of the players, this union can finally do justice to the enormous variety of franchises that the company owns, and which have been dormant for a long time due to the safe bet of working on more Call of Duty.