After almost two years of negotiations, Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard is now a reality. Valued at 68.7 billion dollars (about 65.104 million euros), it is the largest acquisition in the history of video games – and entertainment in general – and is expected to change the balance of forces in an industry as competitive as leisure. electronic.
Beyond the benefits that Microsoft may obtain after the operation, it is now that many consumers who are fans of video games will begin to wonder how this movement of chips will affect them. Will Call of Duty still be available on PlayStation? How will it affect cloud gaming? Below, we will try to answer these questions.
This has been the big question that has hovered over the purchase of Activision Blizzard since it was announced at the beginning of 2022. Throughout this time, Sony has shown fierce opposition to the operation. At the center of their concerns was that Call of Duty, one of the best-selling franchises of the last two decades and which currently has around 90 million monthly players, ends up being exclusive to Xbox.
Microsoft, however, has been open from the beginning to the franchise remaining available on PlayStation, at least for a period of time. Thus, despite how much it cost Sony to accept the agreement, last July the head of Microsoft's video game division, Phil Spencer, announced that his company had reached an agreement with Sony to maintain the Call franchise. of Duty on PlayStation over a ten-year period.
Despite the agreement that will allow this popular first-person action game to remain on the Sony platform for a while longer, the details of this continuity of the franchise on PlayStation have yet to be seen. For example, will it be available on the same launch day as on Xbox? Will it have the same price? Will it have the same characteristics? These are specific details that Microsoft will have to clarify.
In its journey to try to convince regulatory bodies about the benefits of the purchase, Microsoft has announced various collaboration agreements as a sign of goodwill, although some of them have been somewhat unprecedented. For example, the agreement that the Redmond giant announced last February with Nintendo to publish Call of Duty on Nintendo Switch for ten years. This announcement was surprising because this franchise has not been available on the Japanese company's console for years, but, precisely, it also caused rumors about the successor to Nintendo Switch to skyrocket.
Thus, Nintendo users will also be able to enjoy Call of Duty over the next decade, as will Nvidia Geforce Now users, who will not only be able to enjoy the action game as well as other Activision Blizzard titles through this cloud platform. In fact, this deal will allow players to stream Xbox PC games from GeForce Now to PCs, MacOS, Chromebooks, mobile devices, and other devices.
The president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, justified during a press conference in Brussels held in February that with these agreements they had the objective of expanding the Call of Duty player base by 150 million new potential users.
Cloud gaming has been the main concern of the UK competition body when approving the purchase. The CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) considers that this type of distribution through streaming will have a key role in the coming years and that is why it did not look favorably on the dominance that Microsoft would have after the purchase.
In order to obtain approval from the CMA, Microsoft announced in August the sale of the distribution rights for Activision Blizzard games for the European Economic Area to Ubisoft. The multinational of French origin will, therefore, manage the cloud distribution of Call of Duty and the rest of this publisher's games for the next 15 years. In this way, the company responsible for such popular franchises as Assassin's Creed will be able to license Activision Blizard content under different business models, including subscription services.
This is a victory for the CMA, since unlike other competition bodies, it has managed to force Microsoft to correct some of its original intentions with the aim of offering better conditions to consumers.
The fact that Call of Duty will be available on all platforms does not guarantee that this will happen with the rest of the games that will become part of Microsoft. Let us remember that the purchase agreement includes other relevant Activision Blizzard franchises such as Candy Crush, World of Warcraft, Overwatch or Diablo, among others.
Most likely, some titles will continue to be available on all platforms, while others may end up being exclusive. You just have to look at how Microsoft itself decided that Minecraft would continue to be available on the rest of the platforms after purchasing this game in 2014, and how Starfield has become exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem after the purchase of Bethesda in 2020.
What is clear after the purchase of Activision Blizzard has been made is that Microsoft's desire is not so much to enhance its Xbox console, but rather to turn Game Pass into the leading platform in the field of digital distribution of computer video games. , console and mobile phones. Of course, the competition is fierce and it won't be easy, but today's news paves the way for Microsoft to continue being a relevant and dominant player in the video game sector.
