MSFT to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 BILLION

**UPDATE**

According to a tweet earlier today from Phil Spencer, Call of Duty and other exclusive deals will remain on the Playstation platform as per both company’s prior agreements even after the purchase. See below:

According to Yahoo! news earlier this morning, tech giant Microsoft Corp stated it was scooping up Call of Duty and Overwatch maker Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in cash…that’s right folks, cold hard cash! This acquisition would be Microsoft’s second-biggest purchase since their Mojang Studios (Minecraft) and Zenimax (parent company of Bethesda Softworks – makers of Skyrim, Doom, etc.) acquisition in 2020. Microsoft’s offer for $95 per share is higher than what Activision’s stock was previously trading at, which was $89.55 before the market closed on Friday.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has stated “Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms”. This statement has been proven true since the gaming industry has experienced a surge of both new and active players since the beginning of the pandemic, and the intertwining of gaming and the metaverse in recent months.

This is an interesting twist for gamers and more specifically the current Call of Duty install base since it was previously a multi-platform game. If you want to play an exclusive title, you’ll have to have the platform for it. For those that aren’t aware, if you want to play any of the recent Spider-Man games, you’d need a Playstation console to play them. The same goes for other heavy-hitting titles such as The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, and God of War just to name a few. If you want to play games like Gears of War and any of the Halo titles, you can find them on the Xbox platform and PC. Since there’s no official data that depicts how many players are on any of the Call of Duty titles on each platform, there’s no way to tell what the player base is. There are some websites out there that give estimates such as active.player.io and ps-timetracker, but most of them give an overall count across all platforms.