Microsoft Buying Out Activision Blizzard

 

By Liz Glass

eglass@lc.edu

In breaking news within the universal gaming community, Microsoft has bought out Activision Blizzard for a grand total of $68.7 billion. This will officially make Microsoft the third largest gaming company in the world. Many have said this will shake up the gaming industry unlike anything we have seen in decades. This means that Microsoft now owns some of the biggest gaming franchises today – such as the Warcraft franchise, Overwatch, and Call of Duty. It is expected the whole plan will be done in its entirety by July 2022 or July 2023. 

Another big thing that is apparent with this deal is that Activision Blizzard games will be coming to Game Pass, which is similar to services such as Netflix. The Game Pass service from Microsoft essentially gives the player access to a giant digital plethora of games to choose from in exchange for a monthly subscription fee.

A major part that many speculate is Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, might leave after the deal is complete. However, for the time being, he is still present as CEO. Many have made it apparent they desire his removal as CEO due to the company’s history of sexual harassment reports. Now it is up to Microsoft to rid Activision Blizzard’s toxic work malpractices and hopefully set them up for a better and brighter future. 

Some thoughts being thrown out in terms of the players and how they will get through this drastic change are questions like: “What does this mean for the players?” An example of what might happen could be PC players having to transition away from Steam and onto Microsoft’s game store if they want to access a certain game franchise. However, this is only one of few changes people could come up with in terms of thinking about the players themselves. For PlayStation and Mac players, however, this could be way different, thus becoming more difficult in terms of going through a transition. Perhaps they would have to buy a PC or an Xbox in order to even access the games they want to play.

 

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