Microsoft's $68.7-Billion Purchase of Activision Blizzard Could Shake Up Gaming
Microsoft stunned the gaming industry when it announced this week it would buy game publisher Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion (roughly Rs. 5,10,990 crore), a deal that would immediately make it a larger video-game company than Nintendo.
Microsoft, maker of the Xbox gaming system, said acquiring the owner of Candy Crush, Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Diablo would be good for gamers and advance its ambitions for the metaverse — a vision for creating immersive virtual worlds for both work and play.
But what does the deal really mean for the millions of people who play video games, either on consoles or their phones? And will it actually happen at a time of increased government scrutiny over giant mergers in the US and elsewhere?
So, is it good for gamers?
“For the average person who is playing Candy Crush or anything else, there will probably be no changes at all," said RBC analyst Rishi Jaluria.
But Jaluria and other industry watchers think it could be good news for game development more broadly, especially if Microsoft's games-for-everybody mission and mountain of cash can rescue Activision from its reputation for abandoning favorite game franchises while focusing on a few choice properties.
“Microsoft wants to increase the variety of intellectual property," said Forrester analyst Will McKeon-White. “Their target is anyone and everybody who plays video games and they want to bring that to a wider audience."
He said the “most egregious” example of a popular franchise that Activision, founded in 1979, left by the wayside is StarCraft, last updated in 2015. Others include Guitar Hero, the Tony Hawk skateboarding games and MechWarrior, which McKeon-White said “basically wasn't touched for two decades."
On the other hand,
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