Microsoft finally completes gaming’s biggest acquisition
On 13 October 2023, Microsoft officially announced the completed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for an astonishing $68.7 billion. The completed deal not only includes precious brands like Call Of Duty, Diablo, World Of Warcraft, Crash Bandicoot and Candy Crush, but a number of subsidiary studios. Beenox, Demon Ware, Digital Legends, High Moon Studios, Infinity Ward, King, Major League Gaming, Radical Entertainment, Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, Toys For Bob and Treyarch all now fall under the Microsoft umbrella, and join earlier acquisition Zenimax Media, which owned Arkane, id Software, MachineGames and Tango Gameworks. That’s an impressive amount of talent and between them they’re responsible for some truly fantastic modern franchises. King is also a big deal, thanks to its huge success in the mobile division with games like Candy Crush and Farm Heroes Saga, which generate huge amounts of revenue.
Originally announced by Microsoft in January 18 2022, the publisher has faced several challenges with the acquisition due to pressure from the European Commission and later the UK’s Competition And Markets Authority (CMA), with the CMA ruling against the move in April 2023 citing several reasons, including Microsoft’s dominance in cloud gaming. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States has planned to reopen its case against Microsoft, but so far hasn’t been able to prevent Microsoft from closing the deal.
Microsoft has made various concessions to push the gigantic deal through, including promising that the Call Of Duty series will continue to appear on non-Xbox platforms for the next ten years and that its streaming rights will be sold to Ubisoft for its cloud service Ubisoft+ for the next 15 years. Activision’s Bobby Kotick, who has been its CEO since 1991, will be reporting directly to Phil Spencer to help smooth the transition of the companies, but is due to leave in December.
Obviously, the news of the acquisition is concerning some gamers because since the Bethesda acquisition, high-profile games like Starfield haven’t appeared on rival consoles and Microsoft now has access to some incredibly important franchises, which fans fear may also never reach rival systems. Microsoft has proven with the likes of Minecraft that it clearly favours money over exclusivity, and while we’re sure some games will be locked to Xboxes going forward, Call Of Duty’s multiformat status seems assured, at least for the next ten years. Another concern gamers have is that it�
