Activision Blizzard Considered Other Offers Before Microsoft Deal

gamerant.com:

Now that Microsoft has arrived at a deal to acquire Activision Blizzard, smaller details are starting to leak about the things that went on behind the scenes. One of the juicier tidbits that's hit the web since the deal went down is that Microsoft was not the company that Activision Blizzard wanted to strike a deal with.

Whether or not the deal that went down on Tuesday that saw Microsoft begin to take ownership of Activision Blizzard was the original goal, the impending merger shook the video game industry this week. However, since the news first hit, there have been all kinds of questions around the situation, including just how this all came into being. There's also some questions about what exactly is going to happen to Activision's CEO, Bobby Kotick.

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The final disposition of the exec might be one of the reasons that Bobby Kotick was reportedly against Microsoft taking over. Instead, it appears he was hoping that one of two big companies would make the deal. According to a new report from Bloomberg, one of the two firms that Kotick was hoping would make the move Microsoft eventually made was Facebook.

Officially now known as Meta Platforms Inc, Bloomberg's report claims that it was Activision that reached out to the social media giant in order to try and get a deal done. In fact, the company that was under fire due to several lawsuits alleging a toxic work environment reached out to several suitors. The outreach was apparently in reaction to a drop in stock price for Activision Blizzard.

In the end, neither Facebook nor a second "big" company that Kotick's company reached out to were interested in acquiring the company. It's also not