Activision Blizzard's Mobile And PC Presence Was The Driving Force For The Xbox Deal

thegamer.com:

Microsoft's Acquisition of Activision Blizzard came out of nowhere and still has the industry, as well as analysts, reeling from the news. While the acquisition was announced in January of this year, a deal of this magnitude – worth almost $70 billion –takes time to finalize. As the last few formalities get ironed out, Xbox boss Phil Spencer made an appearance on Bloomberg (thanks VGC) to talk about what the acquisition means for all parties involved.

Among a bunch of other things, including how he feels about the deal and the nature of console exclusives, Spencer also talked about why the deal with Activision Blizzard was important for them in terms of audiences on mobile and PC. Acti Blizz has games which have made their mark and are mainstays on their respective platforms, which is a major boost for the Xbox brand.

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“When we were thinking about what we are capable of doing today and where do we need to go, the biggest gaming platform on the planet is mobile phones. One and a half billion people play on mobile phones," he said. "And I guess regretfully as Microsoft it’s not a place we have a native platform. As gaming, coming from console and PC, we don’t have a lot of creative capability that has built hit mobile games.

“One thing about the video game space is, if you’ve been around maybe too long, you know most of the creators out there, so you kind of know teams that could be a good fit in terms of what we were trying to do.

“But we really started the discussions, internally at least, on Activision Blizzard around the capability they had on mobile and then PC with Blizzard. Those were the two things that were really driving our interest.”

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