Michael Pachter, a famous analyst at Wedbush Securities, says if Microsoft gets the go-ahead to acquire Activision Blizzard (which would require regulatory approval from the US’ FTC and the UK’s CMA…), the service could see a significant increase in subscribers.

Pachter admitted on Yahoo Finance Live that he was wrong to question the original idea of Xbox Game Pass: “Microsoft had a vision years ago that I thought was stupid, that they were going to come up with a subscription service, and everybody would pay them for the right to play games. And they didn’t have very many games. Then they went on a buying spree and bought six independent studios, the biggest of which is Obsidian. They’re very, very good. But then they bought Bethesda, a big studio, and now they’re buying Activision.

When they’re done, they are the fourth major game publisher in the US. So they’re going to be giant, and they’re going to be in a position to support their Game Pass subscription. Their future vision is, let’s eliminate the console. Let’s use the cloud, and let’s deliver games to any screen that you have. And that potential market is 3 and 1/2 billion people. So I don’t think they’ll get that many Game Pass subscribers, but will they go from 25 million to 100 million? Yes.”

Pachter says the FTC has no legal basis to block the acquisition: “I can confidently state that the FTC has no legal basis to challenge this. They might try. But the basis for a challenge here would be that if Microsoft were to complete its acquisition of Activision, they would pull games off Sony’s Playstation platform. And Microsoft has already blogged and tweeted we won’t do that. We have contracts. We’ll honour them.

[…] Watch October because that’s nine months after the deal. That’s kind of when the FTC has to fish or cut bait. And if they don’t sue by the end of October, watch Microsoft announce that they will close the deal by year-end. And then we’ll see what the FTC does. But I think this deal closes. I believe it closes no later than January 15. And I think the price is 95 bucks, hence my price target.”

He’s likely on the money.

Source: WCCFTech