The Group has announced its intention to pay $ 68.7 billion to afford the studio that produced “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft”. It would become the third player in the market, after Tencent and Sony.
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A record operation. Tuesday, January 18, Microsoft announced its intention to get your hands on the Activision video game studio for $ 68.7 billion (€ 60.7 billion). The offer, to which the leaders of both parties are consent, must end in 2023, after a vote of the Activision Shareholders and, probably, a review of the competition authorities.
This redemption is the most important ever made in this sector by the giant of Redmond, and also the biggest ever made by him in the absolute, far before the one who led him to appropriate the professional social network LinkedIn for more than $ 26 billion in 2016.
Microsoft’s strength, producer of XBOX consoles, is all the more remarkable as at the time of the Bill Gates and Steve Balmer, the video game division then remained the “poor parent” of the company , explains Julien Pillot, teacher-researcher at INSEEC. Since then, under the leadership of Satya Nadella, the boss of the company since 2014, and from Phil Spencer, at the head of the Video Game Division, she has become one of the pillars of the group. In 2021, it weighed for almost 10% of its $ 168 billion in revenue, up approximately 33% compared to the previous year.
“The greatest form of entertainment”
By announcing the acquisition of Activision, Satya Nadella recalled its ambitions in the sector, noting that the video game was, with 3 billion users, “the greatest form of entertainment and the one that grows the faster “, with a prediction at 4.5 billion consumers in 2030. His reflection does not date from yesterday. It happens that Microsoft has acquired Minecraft. Above all, it was under its aegis, in 2021, the redemption of the Zenimax studio – with its popular Fall Out, Doom, Wolfenstein – for $ 7.5 billion.
By capturing Activision – 400 million monthly active players, 10,000 employees – Microsoft targets a target otherwise higher with even more prestigious titles on PC and consoles, such as Call of Duty or World of Warcraft But also opens a door on the moving game segment, on which it was almost absent. In the bride basket, is indeed the King studio (at the origin of the game Candy Crush), which will allow him to decline his licenses on smartphone faster.
In a market that meets a consolidation as it has never known, the shot operated by Microsoft promises to refattate the cards. Promised with this redemption to become the world’s third largest player behind Chinese Tencent and Japanese Sony, it puts a “huge pressure” to the PlayStation manufacturer, esteem Charles-Louis Plane, a specialist analyst of video game at MidCap Partners. There are no more great studios to buy back, otherwise Electronic Arts (EA) – disabled by the hazards of its agreements with sports federations to develop its flagship titles in football games (with FIFA) or formula 1 (with the FIA) – or Ubisoft.
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