I think this is an overlooked aspect of the Activision acquisition: if the deal goes well, Xbox will become de facto one of the main players in the highly competitive mobile space (Candy Crush, COD Mobile, etc).
Although there is way way bigger than King (Tencent, Zynga…) as the mobile market is a lot more competitive and crowded than the console market, but King is for sure way way way bigger than Bethesda’s Alpha Dog Games with like 30 or 50 people.
And what this could mean for Game Pass along the road.
And as every major player like Supercell ($8.6B in 2016), Glu ($2.4B in 2021), Zynga ($12.7B this year), King ($5.9B in 2016) were being swallowed up by either EA, Tencent, T2 or Activision, you could think that the door was more and more closed for MS or that they weren’t interested that much (even though they had Fallout Shelter, Minecraft or recently a deal with Tencent’s Timi to make Return to Empire in China).
Windows Central wrote an interesting article about that
As the owner of Minecraft, Microsoft was already a big player in the metaverse. The acquisition of Activision Blizzard might just make it the de facto leader. It fuses Microsoft’s expertise in technology such as cloud computing with Activision’s development capabilities across all platforms, not to mention player base of 400 million and Call of Duty and Overwatch esports leagues. It’s an ideal platform from which Microsoft can launch its vision of the metaverse.
That graph kinda says it all, doesn’t it? I have no interest in mobile games but for a business it makes sense to be part of this medium. Obviously Microsoft stepped in really late. I do mostly see it as a different business venture within Microsoft Gaming, which will give Spencer and the leadership team more room to invest, like the Mojang acquisition did. For Microsoft as a whole, it’s probably one of the reasons this deal went through.
Candy Crush is a great game if the stuff that makes it annoying could be removed. It would make no money but I’d pay full console price for it so I’d be happy.
Definitely. You see comments how Microsoft could have gotten this publisher or these developers for the amount of money they are going to spend, but none of them would give Microsoft the door to enter in the mobile space in a big way.
When Satya and Phil talk about reaching billions of gamers they are referring to mobile as well.