Phil Spencer says the Xbox business will become ‘untenable’ if it remains ‘irrelevant’ on mobile
Microsoft’s head of gaming has said that Xbox will struggle to continue as a global business if the company doesn’t establish a foothold in mobile.
While the company’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard is often framed as the Xbox maker seeking to purchase Call of Duty, Phil Spencer has reiterated previous claims that the $68.7 billion deal is primarily driven by Microsoft’s mobile gaming ambitions.
“The idea that Activision is all about Call of Duty on console is a construct that might get created by our console competitor,” he told The Verge’s Decoder podcast (transcribed by VGC).
While not naming Sony directly, the Xbox boss went on to reference concerns the PlayStation maker has submitted to competition regulators currently scrutinising the transaction.
“I haven’t heard [that] Nintendo has been sending in any complaints about the deal,” Spencer noted.
He said that over the past five or six years, all of the growth in the $200 billion global gaming business has come from the mobile segment, while console and PC revenues have remained “relatively flat”.
Spencer, asked about a recent comment Microsoft made to a regulator about being a small player on PC and mobile, said: “I don’t think anybody needs that quote from us to understand how irrelevant we are in mobile. Anybody who picks up their phone and decides to play a game would see that on their own.
“And PC as well, our trials and tribulations over the last five, six years in PC gaming are well kind of documented, and we continue to work at it, and I love the work that the Xbox app team has been on, and our PC studio is doing great work on PC, but it takes time.”
He added: “In terms of the Activision opportunity, and I keep saying this over and over, and it is true,
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