Microsoft buys the video game giant Activision Blizzard for almost 70,000 million

earthquake in the industry video game. Microsoft prepare the purchase from Activision Blizzard, creator of sagas as popular as ‘World of Warcraft‘, ‘Call of Duty‘, ‘Diablo‘ The ‘Candy Crush‘, for 68,700 million dollars (about 60,389 million euros).

The deal, which has yet to be closed, would make the technology multinational founded by Bill Gates y Paul Allen as the owner of what will be the “third largest video game company by revenue”, behind China Tencent and the Japanese Sony.

This is by far the largest purchase operation carried out to date by Microsoft, surpassing when it acquired the social network in 2016 LinkedIn for 26,000 million dollars (22,906 million euros). It is also the largest in the history of the sector, ahead of the purchase of the developer Zynga by the Take-Two company, for which it paid 12.7 billion dollars (11.197 million euros).

Video games have become one of the biggest businesses in the gaming world. entertainment and, with this gesture, Microsoft now seeks to position itself as a leader in this powerful market. “Today the video game is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms and will play a key role in the development of platforms of the metaverse”, explained in a statement its CEO, Satya Nadella. With the operation, Microsoft will add more than 10,000 new employees to its ranks.

sexual abuse scandal

In recent months, the American video game giant has been on the ropes due to investigations that have uncovered multiple cases of violations, sexual harassment Y abuse of power against female employees of the company, a scandal that its executive director, Bobby Kotick, I would have tried to silence. The acquisition by Microsoft will not change the position of Kotick, who will continue to lead the company.

We are joining the @Xbox family.

Learn what this means for our iconic games and player communities: https://t.co/abPxlb37kA pic.twitter.com/Z8sVgsjScz

— Activision Blizzard (@ATVI_AB) January 18, 2022

That normalized culture of misogynistic toxicity has sparked protests from its employees. This same Tuesday it has been known that since July Activision Blizzard has fired some 36 employees and sanctioned another 40 in an attempt to placate this serious internal problem.

Expand the Xbox catalog

Related news

The acquisition of Activision Blizzard marks Microsoft’s biggest bet on video games. A large part of the works created by both companies, merged in 2008, will thus be integrated into the Xbox Game Pass catalog, the subscription service to play on the console Xbox as well as on Microsoft computers. The catalog has been seeking to be something like the Netflix of video games for years and already has 25 million subscribers. Its mission is reinforced with this purchase operation.

“After closing, we will offer all the Activision Blizzard video games that we can within Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, both new titles and others from their incredible catalog,” explained the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer.