BlocksInform
The world's second largest company by market capitalisation, Microsoft, announced that it was acquiring giant game activision blizzard on January 18.
The massive decision to buy the largest videogame company in Europe and North America would be worth $68.7 billion. Moreover, Microsoft mentioned its metaverse ambitions that will put it in competition with other US tech giants.
According to the announcement, the acquisition will “accelerate the growth in Microsoft?s gaming business across mobile, PC, console, and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse.”
Microsoft Into the Metaverse
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed that the acquisition will be pivotal to its Metaverse motivations.
“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,”
Therefore, this is a clear sign that the software giant aims to compete with Meta’s (formerly Facebook) own Metaverse plans.
In addition, the agreement will bring activision blizzard games from Microsoft 25 million subscribed players. It will offer big gaming franchises such as warcraft, diablo, overwatch, call of duty, and candy crush. In addition, blizzard activision has about 400 million monthly active actors in 190 countries.
The move is the biggest microsoft acquisition of all time, more than double the $26 billion it paid for linkedin in 2016. The company had already acquired bethesda, which yielded spinoffs and the series of ancient manuscripts, in a $7.5 billion transaction last year.
The deal has been approved by the boards of directors of both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard and is likely to close in the fiscal year 2023.
Microsoft is the world’s second-largest company with a market cap of $2.27 trillion, according to CompaniesMarketCap. Remarkably, that's more than the entire cryptocurrency market is heading in right now.
2022: Year of Mergers & Acquisitions.
Enterprise conglomerates are likely to grow this year, especially where Mr. Crypto exchange gemini acquired asset management company bitria last week. Meanwhile, NFT market OPENSEA announced that it was purchasing crypto portfolio provider Dharma Labs on January 18.
