Microsoft-Activision, the monstrous birth of a video game titan – Liberation

Deal

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–“Call of Duty”, “Diablo”, “Candy Crush”… In order to enrich its catalog, the tech giant offers itself, for the staggering sum of 70 billion dollars, the publisher of successful games affected by a series of scandals. –

The figure makes you dizzy: 70 billion dollars. Even for Microsoft, which, in the video game industry, is an actor with an unlimited portfolio, the sum is staggering. The tech giant is set to acquire Activision-Blizzard, a major video game developer and publisher, for $68.7 billion (€60.4 billion), according to reports. from Wall Street Journal quickly confirmed by Microsoft. Seventy billion is nearly ten times the amount spent a few months ago to acquire the Bethesda catalog ($8.1 billion, or almost the price of the takeover of MGM by Amazon), in what seemed like a major deal then. Never has the video game seen such a disproportionate move. Microsoft had never committed such sums before in a takeover, having offered LinkedIn in 2016 for 26 billion dollars. And the whole geopolitics of the sector could be turned upside down.

Activision-Blizzard, old giant in the middle of a storm

Born of the merger between Activision and Vivendi Games, some fifteen years ago, Activision-Blizzard was already a video game giant, long the biggest publisher in the sector thanks to several of the most lucrative franchises in industry: shooting games Call of Duty, a quasi-annual series whose cumulative sales dep…

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