The gaming industry was growing apace before the pandemic. Covid-19 lockdowns bolstered its appeal
EVEN FOR Microsoft, which boasts a market capitalisation of around $2.3trn, $69bn is a lot of money. On January 18th the firm said it would pay that sum—all of it in cash—for Activision Blizzard, a video-game developer. It is both the biggest acquisition ever made in the video-game industry and the, more than twice the size of the firm’s purchase in 2016 of LinkedIn, a social network, for $26bn .
In the short term, the deal gives Microsoft more of a foothold in the smartphone-gaming market, to which it has had little exposure. King, a mobile-focused subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, boasts around 245m monthly players of its smartphone games, most of whom tap away at “Candy Crush”. It is also a strike against Sony. If Microsoft controls the rights to “Call of Duty”, it can decide whether or not to allow the games to appear on Sony’s rival PlayStation machine.
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