Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that Microsoft wants to become a dominant player in the gaming industry, and that the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King will help achieve that goal…

The $68.7 billion deal has been completed, handing the Bobby Kotick-led company over to the Redmond tech giant (Kotick will remain CEO of ActiBlizz until the end of the year), and that’s a lot of money, especially when you consider that in 2021 ZeniMax Media, Bethesda’s parent company, was bought by the “greens” for $7 billion. 5 billion, but Microsoft has also acquired a number of other studios since 2018 (Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, Obsidian, inXile, to name a few).

Nadella spoke to Axel Springer for the first time publicly after the acquisition of the Call of Duty publisher. He said that game publishing and development will be a double priority from now on, so it’s not out of the question that we’ll see more investment from Microsoft, who can afford it as they have a lot of money to spend thanks to Windows and Office…

“It is, but we’re really excited about it. For us, there are a few things that go way back for us as a company. Gaming is one of them, right? When I think of Microsoft, I might think of developer tools, proprietary software and gaming. Those are three things that we’ve been doing from the very beginning. And so for us, gaming is the one place where we think we can make a real contribution to consumer markets. When I look at it, the amount of time that people spend playing games is going up, and Gen Z is going to do more of that. The way games are made, the way games are delivered is changing radically. Whether it’s mobile or consoles or PCs or even the cloud. So we’re looking forward to really doubling down both as a game maker and as a publisher. Now we’re going to be one of the biggest game publishers and also a company that builds platforms for that,” said Nadella.

It was Nadella who promoted Xbox boss Phil Spencer to Microsoft’s senior leadership in 2017, so he means it.

Source: WCCFTech