The DeanBeat: Interpreting Microsoft’s $68.7B Activision Blizzard deal as a metaverse play

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Microsoft‘s $68.7 billion pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard will shake up the game industry to its core. It has upset the status quo and will likely trigger more deals.

Within Microsoft, I believe this will trigger or accompany a huge investment in the metaverse, leading to things like a Call of Duty metaverse and similar things for each of the company’s major franchises. A lot of other stories have said it helps Microsoft’s strategy of being the Netflix of gaming, but I think more money is at stake in the metaverse.

I don’t know this for a fact, but I can surmise it from the facts. This deal provides Microsoft many big advantages like giving the company more than 30 game studios (compared to Sony’s 17) and getting all of Activision Blizzard’s games like Call of Duty up on Xbox Game Pass. But I think that is thinking in the past. Microsoft is already the leader in its subscription gaming service, with more than 25 million subscribers.

Some deals are about the here and now, like Take-Two’s $12.7 billion acquisition of Zynga. That is about beefing up Take-Two’s console and PC offerings with mobile games. Mobile games are more than half the market now. Microsoft gets a nice mobile game business with King, which was part of Activision Blizzard. But I think this deal is about the future. And that means the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. We’ll discuss this at our GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 2 event on