The world of video games has been turning over significant amounts of money for years now, well ahead of cinema, music and other entertainment industries. Last year, video game revenue, including mobile phone games, exceeded $180 billion, but analysts forecast that it could reach at least $220 billion this year.
It is therefore no wonder that competition between market players is intensifying and supervisors need to scrutinize every deal made by major players in the industry. Microsoft’s desire to buy the video game developer and publisher Activision Blizzard has been under scrutiny for a year now.
In July, US and British regulators must decide whether to approve the $69 billion deal, which would make Microsoft the world’s third-largest video game company.
Last week, a US court heard arguments for and against allowing the deal to go through.
Although dozens of game series and billions of dollars are “at stake”, a US judge has concluded that the entire dispute between the supervisors and Microsoft is “about one shooting game”.
Tech giant Microsoft has also been an active player in the world of video games, publishing and developing games for decades. In the 2000s, the video game console “Xbox” was also born under the auspices of “Microsoft”, which had to compete with the Japanese “Sony”, “Nintendo” and at that time also “Sega” machines.
In some periods, “Xbox” and, accordingly, “Microsoft” were ahead of their competitors, and in others they were lagging behind. It has been particularly noticeable in recent years, when Sony rushed ahead of the American console with Playstation 4 and Playstation 5. Portal “The Verge” and other video game media explain this by the fact that “Sony” either owns or has close cooperation with video game studios that develop higher quality, more interesting and, above all, exclusive games for their platform. Market analysis company Ampere Analysis concluded that Sony would hold 45% of the entire video game console market in 2022, while Xbox and Nintendo each held about a quarter of the market.
Undeniably, Microsoft also noticed this problem, and to address it, the company began to acquire video game companies.
2023-07-05 11:00:04
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