Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision Blizzard came out of nowhere and still has the industry, as well as analysts, reeling from the news. While the acquisition was announced in January of this year, a deal of this magnitude – worth almost $70 billion – takes time to finalize. As the last few formalities got ironed out, Xbox boss Phil Spencer made an appearance on Bloomberg (thanks VGC) to talk about what the acquisition means for all parties involved.
Among a bunch of other things, including how he feels about the deal and the nature of console exclusives, Spencer also talked about why the deal with Activision Blizzard was important for them in terms of audiences on mobile and PC. Acti Blizz has games that have made their mark and are mainstays on their respective platforms, which is a major boost for the Xbox brand.
“When we were thinking about what we are capable of doing today and where we need to go, the biggest gaming platform on the planet is mobile phones. One and a half billion people play on mobile phones,” he said. “And I guess regrettably as Microsoft it’s not a place we have a native platform. As gaming, coming from console and PC, we don’t have a lot of creative capability that has built hit mobile games.
“One thing about the video game space is, if you’ve been around maybe too long, you know most of the creators out there, so you kind of know teams that could be a good fit in terms of what we were trying to do .
“But we really started the discussions, internally at least, on Activision Blizzard around the capability they had on mobile and then PC with Blizzard. Those were the two things that were really driving our interest.”
There’s no denying the impact King’s Candy Crush has had on the mobile market. It has managed to penetrate into all age demographics, especially the older ones who also tend to spend money on microtransactions. Of course, in terms of the PC, Xbox will soon own two of the biggest IPs on the platform, namely Call of Duty World of Warcraft.