The Xbox boss could make a significant push on iOS and Android by taking over the Bobby Kotick-led publisher (which also owns King, one of the prominent mobile developers known for Candy Crush).

Bloomberg asked Phil Spencer how the $68.7 billion bid for Activision Blizzard, to which Spencer said that Microsoft is looking to increase its creative capacity beyond consoles, so mobile and PC expansion would be their focus if regulators approve the acquisition (an example of this has already been done: Saudi Arabia, which has essentially absorbed SNK, has already agreed to buy it):

“When we were thinking about what we can do today and where we need to go, the biggest gaming platform on the planet is mobile phones. One and a half billion people play on mobile phones. And regretfully, as Microsoft, it’s not a place we have a native platform. As gaming, coming from console and PC, we don’t have a lot of creative capability that has built hit mobile games. One thing about the video game space is, if you’ve been around maybe too long, you know most of the creators out there, so you kind of know teams that could be a good fit in terms of what we were trying to do. But we started the discussions internally on Activision Blizzard around the capability they had on mobile and then PC with Blizzard. Those were the two things that were driving our interest,” Spencer said.

During the April-June quarter, Activision Blizzard had 361 million active players, King had 240 million, Blizzard had 27, and Activision had 94 million, so there’s a sense here that the mobile market has a pretty sizeable camp. Spencer added if he thinks consoles will still be with us in ten years: “I equate in my head gaming on a console to gaming on a television. But people are playing on more screens, and I think for us as a platform, if we don’t adopt that as part of our strategy, we’re pushing against what our customers are asking for.”

His logic is understandable.

Source: VGC