Microsoft Acquires Activision Blizzard: What’s Next for Gaming

if you woke up this morning with microsoft buys activision blizzard on your bingo card well good for you it’s an almost 70 billion dollar deal that’s bound to have a huge impact on the industry but i’m more interested in what it means for gamers like you and me i think the first big question people are asking is does this mean activision blizzard games are going to be locked into uh just the xbox or xbox

Background of the Acquisition

and pc i say the smart money is on probably not there are a lot of franchises call of duty overwatch they’re just too big to be locked into just one console and pc we’re going to continue to see those on other platforms on playstation on switch cloud streaming on mobile i think it’s going to continue remember activision blizzard controls a lot of other big brands like diablo and yes like candy crush

Strategic Goals for Microsoft

because it has that king subsidiary that makes mobile games this also gives microsoft a much bigger foothold in esports which is an area it really has not been a driving force in but taking over some of the big esports brands whether it’s overwatch whether it’s starcraft i think that means that we’re going to see a lot more microsoft influence in esports this is another big potential step for game pass and it further

differentiates the possibilities of game pass from what sony offers with the playstation which is this weird combination of playstation plus and playstation now neither of which are even close to being as comprehensive as xbox game passes and of course it’s two separate services you have to subscribe to that said sony is said to be working on a revamped version of its subscription offerings maybe something

that combines those two into something that’s a little more game pass like but now that microsoft is adding the activision catalog and probably bringing at least some of those games to game pass i think it’s going to be an even tougher hill for sony to climb remember that microsoft already has a deal to offer access to some ea games through ea play that you can get by being an xbox game pass ultimate

subscriber so maybe if you take a future version of game pass that has microsoft games nea games and activision blizzard games well that’s really a lot of stuff under one subscription it really takes a lot of chips off the table when it comes to asking gamers to purchase individual standalone games another

Impact on the Gaming Industry

big question people are asking is does this mean exclusive games exclusive for just one console are going to be much more than norm than even they are now and also what happens to other top tier aaa publishers are they going to be able to exist in the future as independent companies or they inevitably going to get snatched up by one of the other big players remember microsoft already owns bethesda and

is taking at least some future bethesda games xbox only or xbox and pc only this also reminds me of how disney snapped up marvel and star wars and ended up paying about 4 billion dollars each for those which really seems like a bargain in hindsight especially because we’re talking about 67 billion dollars for activision blizzard so who’s next if somebody’s going on a shopping spree electronic arts their

Changes for Activision Blizzard’s Games and Developers

market cap is about 39 billion dollars take two they’re about 18 billion dollars these become an acquisition target for microsoft probably not for sony but what about apple or google who are always trying to bolster their gaming bonafides and build out things like apple arcade which is a thing but it’s kind of very limited in its box and that’s where it is or google stadia which had a big splash but hasn’t moved the needle a lot lately even as cloud gaming becomes more and more important and microsoft is

already eating up a lot of the oxygen in the room when it comes to cloud gaming and what about nvidia that is a huge market cap company very influential in gaming it’s building its own platform via geforce now but that’s also a very different animal i’ve said going back 10 plus years that cloud gaming is the future basically server side gaming where you don’t have any hardware locally everything is played on a

remote server and beamed back to you that said it’s taken a lot longer to take off than i ever thought it would there’s still a lot of implementations and technology hurdles there microsoft is doing a really interesting job with what they used to call xcloud now it’s microsoft cloud gaming and you’ve also of course got nvidia geforce now and google stadia and amazon’s version of it that is called i’ve already

forgotten uh luna so there’s definitely a lot of potential players in that cloud gaming space and they could all be interested in buying some of these uh developers and publishers to try to get some exclusive titles that will bring you into those services what can we take away from microsoft buying activision blizzard i think it continues to teach us that scale is really everything these days and interest rates are low so there’s

less cost to growing through acquisition and of course we’re going to continue to see that i think the gaming industry in particular is very fertile ground for increased consolidation i’m also thinking about what happens to companies like valve and epic although these companies are really more about their underlying technology like the unreal engine uh and about distribution platforms than just being you

know game publishers or game creators when you think about what this all means for gamers whether you’re an xbox game or a pc gamer a playstation gamer a switch gamer maybe a cloud game or a mobile gamer i think there’s a lot of unknowns in the future some of the things i am thinking about already is what happens to battle.net that’s the old-school blizzard game platform and storefront uh pc gamers i think already have too many platforms and storefronts to deal with maybe it’s time to clean up that

landscape a little bit maybe they fold that in with the xbox app that runs the pc gaming side of microsoft’s xbox game pass gaming i’m also somewhat surprised that activision ceo bobby kotick who’s been under fire for many months about his company’s toxic culture is number one staying on and number two there wasn’t really a mention of any of that in microsoft’s press announcement that means all

The Future of Xbox and Cloud Gaming

that negative connotation now is on microsoft shoulders and it’s going to be their responsibility to deal with it going forward and then of course there’s a most important question for any tech news in 2022 what does it mean for the metaverse i’m kidding but only slightly there’s a throwaway line in

microsoft’s press materials about how this is going to quote provide building blocks for the metaverse which is about as clear as pretty much every other metaverse mentioned these days so microsoft buying activision blizzard obviously it’s a big deal and means a lot for the games industry for the technology industry and frankly for the subscription service industry because so much of it is built around game pass

on the gaming side what does it mean for gamers like me and you i think it means that we’re going to see more merging of activision and ea play and microsoft and bethesda games all under these single subscriptions which is going to drive a lot of pressure to add new content to keep you subscribed and keep you paying month after month because everybody from apple to adobe has shown subscriptions are the future  

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