This week, Xbox announced that it's acquiring Activision-Blizzard for nearly $69 billion. It's an absurd amount of money, but not that much for a company like Microsoft, which boasts a market value of over $2.2 trillion. For the biggest acquisition in the history of video games, Xbox now owns IP like Call of Duty, Overwatch, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Tony Hawk, Hearthstone, Prototype, Candy Crush, Sekiro, and Starcraft. And of course, it now also owns all the studios behind these games. While this will go down as the biggest gaming acquisition of the year, it wasn't the first major acquisition in 2022. A few days prior Take-Two Interactive -- the parent company of Rockstar Games and 2K -- acquired Zynga in a deal worth more than $12 billion. All of that said, apparently, this is just the beginning.

Over on Twitter, industry insider, Tom Henderson shared a cryptic tease, noting that "it seems like things are just getting started too," followed by the eyes emoji. This tease was in response to Xbox's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Unfortunately, this is the extent of the tease. There are no further details, and for now, it's unclear how much of this is based on inside knowledge versus speculation. Chances are it's a combination of both.

Between the likes of Microsoft, Sony, Tencent, Embracer Group, and a few others, studios and publishers are being acquired right and left. And the more this happens, the more it snowballs. It's an arms race. And in this arms race, the company with the most money -- Microsoft -- is probably going to win because that's just how money works.



Posted: Jan 21, 2022 8:21 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/xbox-one-series-x-microsoft-activision-blizzard-acquisitions/