Microsoft Acquire Activision Blizzard in a $68.7 Billion cash deal

Written by City Communications

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January 20, 2022

On Tuesday the 18th of January Microsoft announced that they will buy the video game giant Activision Blizzard allowing them to become one of the biggest gaming companies in the world in terms of investments competing with Tencent Holdings, who own games like League of Legends, PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds and Clash of Clans to name a few. There other competitor would be Sony, they own games such of Spider-Man, Death Stranding, God of War and many more. When this was announced Sony stocks plummeted by 13% which may not sound like much but equivalates to around $20 billion dollars and this is a massive hit to the company.

With this acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft are gaining many major triple A games such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Candy Crush and many others. This is going to be then added to there long list of owned franchises like Minecraft and Doom giving Microsoft a diverse range of games for everyone to play.

Many speculations have come from this deal, the main one being that Microsoft will make games like the new Call of Duty, set to release in 2022, Xbox exclusive making it so you cannot play it without an Xbox live account. This could happen but they will receive a lot of criticism from the PlayStation community as if they want to play some games, they may have to buy a whole other console.

Others have also said all these games may be on the Xbox Game Pass allowing people to pay £10.99 a month for games usually worth £50 and over. If this is true it may bring many customers to game pass who once did not want to buy it. Previously, the Game Pass has struggled to gain a lot of momentum due to not having many triple A games. They have slowly increased to 25 million subscriptions, but this will grow massively if all goes as predicted.

Allegedly the metaverse was a big factor into why Microsoft brought Activision Blizzard as they are trying to compete with Facebook for the future of technology. Knowing that virtual reality is mainly a gaming market as of 2022, Microsoft now have an advantage over Facebook as they can produce these games in VR form and target the market of the future.

Microsoft is aiming to become the place where everyone goes to play games. With its Game Pass service, Microsoft is already attempting to become the Netflix of Gaming. Netflix however has serious competition in giants such as Disney, Amazon and Apple, no other company can compete with Microsoft. Even Nintendo, which is the longest running company in gaming does not have $70 billion to throw at acquisitions. (It has around $9 Billion available) {source – The Guardian}. It’s no longer a level playing field and historically buying into the gaming industry has never worked for tech giants. Amazon and Google have both failed. Apple’s Gaming pass hasn’t been the huge success they were hoping for yet. Microsoft itself has already had several failures in the past acquiring developers such as Lionhead only to have to close them down later.

Games are art and entertainment not technology. Tech is what should enable games, create them, tech is not what games are. Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “We’re investing deeply in world-class content, community and the cloud to usher in a new era of gaming that puts players and creators first and makes gaming safe, inclusive and accessible to all.” so we hope that its gives creators a more secured environment to create great content.

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