My Life As A Gamer: Activision Gets Eaten

This is what I wake up to today.

With three billion people actively playing games today and fueled by a new generation steeped in the joys of interactive entertainment, gaming is now the largest and fastest-growing form of entertainment. Today, Microsoft Corp. announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard Inc., a leader in game development and interactive entertainment content publisher. This acquisition will accelerate the growth in Microsoft’s gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse.

When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony. The planned acquisition includes iconic franchises from the Activision, Blizzard and King studios like “Warcraft,” “Diablo,” “Overwatch,” “Call of Duty” and “Candy Crush,” in addition to global eSports activities through Major League Gaming. The company has studios around the word with nearly 10,000 employees.

“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,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “We’re investing deeply in world-class content, community and the cloud to usher in a new era of gaming that puts players and creators first and makes gaming safe, inclusive and accessible to all.”

Predators are going to predate, and wounded rivals are obvious targets.

Microsoft taking the opportunity to eliminate a rival and assimilate what useful elements remain into itself is not surprising. Who they eliminated and when is, and I would not be surprised if there is some action going down regarding an anti-trust action as this makes Microsoft a very powerful--and large--enterprise with considerable vertical integration.

Couple this with recent statements by Phil Spector expressing his desire to exercise arbitrary power to exclude people for equally arbitrary reasons, when that position is approaching the utility of Amazon, and you have cause for concern that any ordinary and competent official would see as sufficiently dangerous to warrant intervention on anti-trust grounds.

So yes, this is cause for concern. Not yet panic, but definitely concern.