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Microsoft Battlefield is a dynamo. With revenues that compete with the GDP of a small nation, it has enough money to buy whatever it wants. When he does, he just acquires another money-making machine. His latest widget? The video game company Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft announced yesterday was buying for a staggering $ 68.7 billion – more than the $ 26.2 billion it paid for LinkedIn in 2016, nearly 10 times the $ 7.5 billion it paid. paid for ZeniMax Media at Bethesda last year. Microsoft already owns Call of Duty and halo; 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. His chest is full – but not with machines.
It’s tempting to see the acquisition as the latest shot in console wars, a trick to use Activision Blizzard’s deep catalog to sell Xboxes. But that would be short-sighted. If nothing else, the deal shows that Microsoft is much more concerned with acquiring gamers – it will earn 400 million active players a month as part of the deal – than with mobile units. Activision Blizzard’s fantastic franchises will also accelerate our plans for cloud gaming, the company said in a statement announcing the deal, “allowing more people in more parts of the world to participate in the Xbox community using phones, tablets, laptops and more.” devices that you already own. “This is Microsoft’s move to the world after the console. It’s not about making you buy a gadget; it’s about luring into an ecosystem.
When discussing online video game services such as Stadia, Sony’s PlayStation Now and Microsoft’s Cloud Gaming, insiders often reach for the same descriptor: X is Netflix for gaming. The goal of each service is to become the player’s center month after month. In fact, Phil Spencer, who will be named CEO of Microsoft Gaming with the acquisition, often uses this comparison. “You and I can watch Netflix. I don’t know where you watch it, where I watch it, but we can talk about the shows we watch, “he told WIRED in 2020.” I want the games to develop to the same level. “
This is eloquent, especially because it contradicts Spencer’s apparent indifference to where people play Microsoft titles. This in itself is a rejection of the console wars, which have historically been tied to Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony with temptingly shaped plastic boxes. These “fenced gardens,” Spencer said, are a “90s structure” he would like to see dismantled. Microsoft ‘s new property Candy Crush fits into that vision, giving the company an immediate presence in mobile gaming that goes beyond discussions about the Xbox Series X.
“They’re not coming out of the consoles, but they’re trying to reduce the extent to which they’re attached to the Xbox,” said Jost van Drünen, a business professor at New York University and author of One up, a book on the global gaming business. “It’s just going to be one of the entry points into their ecosystem.”
The goal here is a simple service – the rear catalog of Activision Blizzard is the carrot to attract users to this space. The deal could take 12 to 18 months, but when it does, Microsoft “will offer as many Activision Blizzard games as we can within the Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, both new titles and games from the catalog of Activision Blizzard, “Spencer said in the company’s announcement of the acquisition. “They clearly see the games as an entry point that leads to a much wider universe,” says van Drunen. “The Game Pass service takes advantage of this.”
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