Microsoft has officially announced that they have entered into a deal to purchase publisher Activision Blizzard and all of its development studios via an Xbox Wire blog post. The deal is reported to be around $70 billion, which would make it the largest video game acquisition in history, far outstripping Take-Two Interactive’s recent acquisition of Zynga.
The Xbox Wire post, written by Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, details all the intellectual properties and various studios Xbox will acquire as part of this deal. Should the purchase go through, Xbox would become the publisher of such lauded game series as Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and World of Warcraft. Studios like Raven Software, Toys for Bob, Treyarch, and High Moon Studios would also join Xbox Game Studios as first-party developers.
Once the deal is finalized, Xbox Game Pass subscribers will have access to a suite of Activision Blizzard titles from their existing catalog, as well as new titles developed under Xbox’s ownership. Activision’s mobile game presence will also be utilized to bolster Xbox’s Cloud Gaming initiatives.
Activision Blizzard has been in the news quite a bit lately for less celebratory reasons. Activision’s current CEO, Bobby Kotick, is an extremely unpopular figure in the gaming industry for his alleged coverups of sexual misconduct and the promotion of toxic workplace culture. Spencer specifically notes in his post that, “once the deal is complete, the Activision Blizzard business will report to me as CEO, Microsoft Gaming,” but whether or not Kotick will be outed as part of the acquisition remains to be seen.
While Spencer never outright addresses the issues Activision Blizzard has been facing, he does emphasize inclusion and respect for everyone who works at Microsoft or plays their games: “We believe that creative success and autonomy go hand-in-hand with treating every person with dignity and respect.”
An acquisition of this size puts Microsoft and Xbox in a precarious legal position vis-à-vis anti-trust laws. AT&T’s recent acquisition of Time Warner was met with a government lawsuit that blocked the purchase for some time, and it’s very possible that Microsoft could be met with the same obstacle.
Should the deal go through, this will be a historic merger that will transform Xbox into a first-party juggernaut with a slate of the most popular IPs in video game history. The acquisition will undoubtedly take some time to finalize, just as Xbox’s purchase of Zenimax Media did last year. Until then, stay tuned to GameTyrant for more on this story as it develops.
