Top 10 Most Expensive Video Game Buyouts Of All Time

gamespot.com:

By Eddie Makuch on

Many mature industries trend toward consolidation as time goes on, and the video game business is no different. Big companies are bought and sold for massive sums of money. This was made evident yet again recently when Sega splashed out $776 million to acquire Angry Birds developer Rovio, which was the second high-profile deal in 2023, following Savvy Games Group paying $4.9 billion to acquire mobile and social game developer Scopely. But what are the biggest of the big buyouts? Here in this post, we're rounding up the top 10 most expensive video game acquisitions of all time, a list that's topped by Microsoft's pending $68.7 billion bid to buy Activision Blizzard in what is far and away the biggest gaming deal in history. It's also one of the biggest acquisitions–across all markets from oil and energy to technology.

Microsoft actually makes the list three times, the most of any single company, spending around $79.3 billion on video game buyouts since 2014 (a sum that includes the proposed deal for Activision Blizzard). Another trend is many of the biggest deals are focused on mobile titles. Companies like Take-Two, EA, and Tencent snapped up established mobile game studios to help give them a bigger piece of the pie as it relates to potential earning possibilities, and Microsoft has cited mobile as a big motivating factor behind its attempted Activision Blizzard acquisition.

The 10th biggest acquisition in the history of video games came in 2021 when Electronic Arts splashed out $2.4 billion to acquire Glu Mobile, the developer of many mobile titles. One of its marquee games is Kim Kardashian's mobile game, but the company's roster includes a range of others, such as Disney Sorcerer's Arena, Diner