Activision Blizzard Is Microsoft's Biggest Acquisition Of All Time, Here's How It Stacks Up

gamespot.com:

Microsoft made waves on Monday with its announcement that it plans to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in the largest gaming acquisition in history and Microsoft's biggest overall.

But how, exactly, does the acquisition stack up against Microsoft's previous buyouts, other gaming acquisitions, and deals across other industries? Let's dig in.

For Microsoft, this was the company's biggest acquisition of all time, and not just for gaming--and not by a small margin. The $68.7 billion that Microsoft is proposing to pay for Activision Blizzard is about 3X bigger than the $26.2 billion that Microsoft paid for LinkedIn in 2016, which was previously the company's biggest buyout of all time. Next behind that was the $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance in 2021. Before that, Microsoft paid $8.5 billion to acquire Skype in 2011. Note that all of the buyout numbers referenced in this post are not adjusted for inflation.

Looking at the video game industry specifically, Microsoft's buyout of Activision Blizzard is significantly more expensive than the $8.1 billion it paid for ZeniMax/Bethesda and factors larger than the $2.5 billion it paid for Mojang and the Minecraft series.

Outside of Microsoft's own gaming deals, this is the largest buyout in video game history by a massive margin. Before today, the biggest gaming acquisition in history was Take-Two's $12.7 billion buyout of Zynga, which was just announced last week. In 2016, Tencent paid $8.6 billion to acquire Clash of Clans developer Supercell in what was at the time the biggest ever.

Another massive deal was Activision Blizzard's $5.9 billion buyout of Candy Crush studio King in 2015--King is now set to become part of Microsoft.

Another gaming acquisition that crossed