When Microsoft attempted to acquire Activision Blizzard for US$68.7 billion, Sony, as its largest competitor, was always one of the biggest opponents, constantly emphasizing that the deal would be quite unfair to market competition. Impact, and just after the acquisition was officially completed this month, industry analysts began to speculate that Sony may be planning another large-scale acquisition to counter Microsoft’s strategy .
According to industry consultant Dr. Serkan Toto, he believes that Sony’s PlayStation team is currently “feeling pressure” due to the completion of Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition, which requires them to respond as soon as possible. Nearly two full years after the official announcement, Microsoft finally officially announced on Friday that they have successfully acquired Activision Blizzard, completing the largest merger and acquisition in the history of the video game industry.
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The completion of this acquisition means that Microsoft now holds the publishing rights to a large number of Activision Blizzard King’s IPs, including well-known PC and console titles such as “Call of Duty”, “World of Warcraft” and “Diablo” Game series, not only that, they also got popular mobile games from King Studio such as “Candy Crush”.
“Sony is definitely feeling a lot of pressure to respond as quickly as possible, even though they have acquired Bungie before. I expect they will launch more investment and acquisition plans for PlayStation in the near future, which may include a An acquisition large enough to have a significant impact,” Serkan Toto said.
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Sony acquired the developer of the “Destiny” series for $3.6 billion in July last year, breaking the record for a Japanese game company acquisition. However, such a scale is still compared to the price Microsoft paid for Activision Blizzard. It’s a small witch who sees a big witch.
Karol Severin, chief games industry analyst at Midia Research, said he believes that if Sony plans to respond to this acquisition, they will have to acquire a large company such as Take-Two, the publisher of “Grand Theft Auto”. Game publishers will have to invest at least $24.6 billion in this effort. However, he believes that Sony is also likely to use their characteristics across movies, TV, games and music to establish a very large subscription platform spanning a variety of different entertainment media to compete more closely with Game Pass.
“Sony has the most diverse content catalog in the world. For example, if all these contents are integrated into a huge subscription platform, it will definitely bring more solid competition to Xbox’s multi-platform strategy. Just rely on It seems difficult to compete with Microsoft in terms of games. As far as the game field is concerned, the only response Sony can make is to acquire a publisher as large as Take-Two, but this seems unlikely.”
