Microsoft War Chest is a generator. With revenues on par with the GDP of a small country, they have enough cash to buy whatever they want. When it does, it just gets another money machine. Its latest gadget? Video game company Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft yesterday announced a purchase for a staggering $68.7 billion — more than the $26.2 billion they paid LinkedIn in 2016, almost 10 times the $7.5 billion they paid for ZeniMax Media, Bethesda’s parent company, last year. Microsoft now owns Call of Duty and Halo; it owns The Elder Scrolls and World of Warcraft. It owns Candy Crush. It also owns Diablo, Overwatch, Spyro, Hearthstone, Guitar Hero, Crash Bandicoot, and StarCraft. Its breasts are full – but not mechanically.
It’s tempting to consider the acquisition as the latest shot fired in console wars, a plot that uses Activision BlizzardDeep catalog of Xbox for sale. But that would be short-sighted. If anything, the deal shows that Microsoft is more interested in attracting gamers — it will get 400 million monthly active players as part of the deal — than with moving units. . “The great franchises on Activision Blizzard will also accelerate our plans for Cloud Gaming,” the company said in a statement. statement announced the deal, “allowing more people in more parts of the world to join the Xbox community using the phones, tablets, laptops, and other devices you already own.” This is Microsoft’s move towards a post-console world. It is not for you to buy a device; it’s about drawing you into an ecosystem.
When discussing online video game services like Stadia, Sony’s PlayStation Now, and Microsoft’s Cloud Gaming, insiders often come up with the same description: X is “Netflix for games.” The goal of each service is to become the hub of the players, month after month. Indeed, Phil Spencer, whose acquisition will be the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, frequently uses this analogy. “You and I can watch Netflix. I don’t know where you watch it, where I watch it, but we can chat about what shows we watch,” he said. tell WIRED in 2020. “I want the game to evolve to the same level.”
This is telling, especially given how indifferent Spencer seems to be about where people play Microsoft titles. That in itself is a negation of the console war, which has historically been associated with the alluringly shaped plastic boxes of Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony. Spencer says these “walled gardens” are a “90s piece of architecture” that he wants to be dismantled. Microsoft’s New Ownership of Candy Crush aligns with this vision, giving the company an immediate presence in mobile gaming that transcends Xbox Series X discussions.
Joost van Dreunen, a business professor at New York University and author of One up, a book on the global game business. “That would just be one of the entry points into their ecosystem.”
The goal here is a streamlined service — the latter category of Activision Blizzard is the carrot for drawing users into that space. It can take 12 to 18 months for the deal to close, but when it does, Microsoft “will offer as many Activision Blizzard games as possible in Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, both new titles and games from its catalog Activision Blizzard,” Spencer said in the company’s announcement of the acquisition. “They clearly see gaming as a starting point to a much larger universe,” says Van Dreunen. “The Game Pass service has benefited greatly from this.”
