This week Microsoft announced its agreement to acquire Activision Blizzard for more than $68 billion dollars, in a transaction that is expected to end in mid-2023. With this, Microsoft would dramatically increase the number of developer studios under its command, as well as the IPs of video game franchises such as Call of Duty, Overwatch , Guitar Hero, Candy Crush and many more. Once the merger takes place, Microsoft would become the third highest earning video game company, behind Tencent and Sony.
In an interview with The Washington Post, phil spencer said the acquisition of Activision Blizzard seeks to differentiate Microsoft in the global video game space, amid the projects and investments of other technology giants such as Apple, Google, Meta, Netflix and Tencent, each of whom has sought to dabble in video games in their own way. According to Spencer, he worries about what tech companies unfamiliar with video games might do, but trust Sony, Nintendo and Valve.
They have a long history in video games. Nintendo isn’t going to do anything that will hurt gaming in the long run because that’s the business they’re in. Sony is the same and I trust them… Valve is the same. When we look at the other big tech competitors to Microsoft: Google has search with Chrome, Amazon has shopping, Facebook has social, all of these businesses are consumed at scale by consumers.”
Related: Activision Blizzard games would come to mobile thanks to Xbox Cloud Gaming.
According to what Phil Spencer says, Microsoft trusts that Nintendo, Sony and Valve would not do something detrimental to the industry of video games, since they have been dedicating themselves to this for many years and plan to continue in this business. By contrast, the other big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta only see gaming as secondary, as we’ve seen in their experiments with Stadia, Amazon Games, and Facebook Gaming.
I think that we have a unique point of view, that it is not that everything has to run on a single device or platform. That’s been the real turning point for us, seeing gaming as an opportunity for consumers that could have a similar impact on Microsoft that other large-scale businesses have on other big tech competitors.”
the idea you have phil spencer is that the Xbox platform and its video games are a service that is consumed on a large scale globally, as well as the search engine and browser of Google, purchases and services amazon and the social networks of Goal such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.
Read more: Phil Spencer: Xbox will implement an inclusive culture at Activision Blizzard.
With the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is also going to acquire your problems, but they seek to implement an inclusive work environment to fix the problems that plague the company so much. Although the deal is still more than a year away, Microsoft says they are looking to add as many Activision Blizzard games to Xbox Game Pass as they can.