But it wasn’t Bobby Kotick (who was planning to sell to someone else other than Microsoft before and who will most likely be thrown out by the time the acquisition process is completed); he was also found to be considering buying up several websites.

Microsoft started the year strongly enough when it offered nearly seventy billion dollars for Activision Blizzard, which has been in the news recently only because of its scandals. It’s not so surprising then that Bloomberg reported that the scandals triggered the sale talks, but Kotick has also approached several candidates.

The first candidate was not Microsoft, but Mark Zuckerberg’s company, which was renamed Meta last autumn from Facebook, did not take up the offer. So Redmond was the final choice, and Activision Blizzard negotiated the deal over the holidays. Hence, the recent interview with Phil Spencer, where he refused to point fingers at the company’s management, made more sense because it was essentially about his employees…

The Xbox boss, along with Kotick, appeared in a CNBC interview. “3 billion gamers on the planet today, people playing in all regions, creators coming from everywhere, and we’re always sharing our strategy with our partners and talking to them about their feedback. I think we’ve always just had a good connection with the team at Activision Blizzard about where we’re trying to go. But honestly, this is a deal that happened pretty quickly. Like I’d say, we really had some formative discussions about this specific opportunity late in the year, and we just felt like now was the right time to add the right resources and capability to both companies,” Spencer said. By the way, Microsoft has also hit a goldmine in the mobile market, with Kotick taking over King, the creator of Candy Crush, at the end of 2015…

Spencer added, “This is an incredibly competitive marketplace in the gaming space. The truth is that the largest gaming platforms on the planet are the mobile devices out there, distribution on those contents, and control those devices. Two companies control it. So you look at a company like Microsoft, and we’re bringing together content and intellectual property to offset the distribution capabilities we don’t have on mobile devices. This is our opportunity to fight to compete on the largest platform out there in gaming, which is mobile devices, that’s critically important to us. As Bobby said, we have more creators on our platform than we’ve ever had. We have games coming from all; we have games coming from big publishers like EA, Activision, and Take-Two. But you also look at many homegrown games from small teams that can reach a global scale because of the distribution they’re finding on PC and gaming consoles. It’s an incredibly vibrant space right now.”

It is not certain that Call of Duty will be Xbox-exclusive, as the acquisition is likely to be approved by US regulators. Whatever the case, the Wall Street Journal reports that Kotick wanted to acquire publications criticising the publisher, such as Kotaku and PC Gamer, to put Activision Blizzard back in a positive light. An Activision spokesperson denied this, G/O Media (owner of Kotaku) declined to comment, and PC Gamer did not respond. In other words, Kotick, who is currently still in the CEO’s chair, wanted to solve the problem with money…

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech, VGC