XBOX just made a major move in the console wars. How major? Well $68.7 BILLION for Activision/Blizzard/King so they now own Call Of Duty , World Of Warcraft , StarCraft , Overwatch , Diablo , Candy Crush & Spyro & Crash Bandicoot who were formerly Sony Playstation mascots. Wild times especially so relatively soon after Bethesda acquisition. I had a feeling XBOX would be in the acquisition game this year but never thought they would go THIS big. It’s pretty wild. They spent in this one transaction roughly half of the Sony Market Cap which at the time of the deal was roughly $156 Billion.
This is a huge get for the Microsoft XBOX. Spending this much you would imagine Call Of Duty will be exclusive going forward. Now why is that such a big deal as far as Sony Playstation goes? Well last year the number 1 & 3 seller on Playstation were Call of Duty Vanguard & Call of Duty : Black Ops Cold War. They ripped a LOT of gamers away from XBOX with their deals with Activision when it comes to Call Of Duty. Well now those people will have to get into the XBOX ecosystem if they want to continue playing. That means buying a console or getting XBOX Game Pass PC or the smart TV apps that are said to be coming or the dongle that has been making the rumor rounds as of late. The console war is over if Microsoft is willing to spend this much. Sony literally can’t compete.
Sony has as of last available quarter $16.797 Billion in cash on hand as of September 30 2021 and Microsoft XBOX has as of September 30, 2021 was $130.615 Billion . So it’s not even close and Sony has a Market Cap of $156.64 Billion. Microsoft has $2.27 Trillion. 14.49 times the size of SONY. If SONY really wants to compete long term they are going to have to sell to Apple , Google , or Amazon. They just don’t and won’t have the funds to compete head to head against Microsoft.
So now added to Microsoft Game Studios is Blizzard , Beenox , Digital Legends , High Moon Studios , Infinity Ward , Radical Entertainment , Raven Software , Sledgehammer games , Toys for Bob , Treyarch bringing the XBOX Game Studios up to 32 first party studios. So SONY Ponies how’s that No Game XBOX going? See you on Game Pass.
XBOX is now the Shooter Console of choice just like they were the Western RPG console of choice after buying Bethesda. They now have Call Of Duty , Halo , Gears Of War , Overwatch , Doom , Wolfenstein , Perfect Dark , Hexen , Hertic among others. Such a nice variety in there as well. Good luck SONY I legit look forward to seeing what you do to try and counter this.
Here are the IPs that Microsoft XBOX gets in the deal if you’re worrying about what they can bring to Game Pass as far as legacy games & new versions.
- Blur
- Caesar
- Call of Duty
- Candy Crush
- Crash Bandicoot
- Diablo
- DJ Hero
- Empire Earth
- Gabriel Knight
- Geometry Wars
- Guitar Hero
- Gun
- Hearthstone
- Heretic
- Heroes of the Storm
- Hexen
- Interstate ’76
- King’s Quest
- Laura Bow Mysteries
- The Lost Vikings
- Overwatch
- Phantasmagoria
- Pitfall
- Police Quest
- Prototype
- Quest for Glory
- Singularity
- Skylanders
- Solider of Fortune
- Space Quest
- Spyro the Dragon
- StarCraft
- Tenchu (legacy games)
- TimeShift
- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
- True Crime
- World of Warcraft
- Zork
With so many first party studios & multiple teams inside those studios I imagine a bunch of these games are going to be filling up XBOX Game Pass for many years to come.
Source : https://twitter.com/XboxP3/status/1483431362094796800