Billions for good games - Largest acquisitions

These are the largest acquisitions of gaming companies of all time

As many as ten of the 15 largest acquisitions of gaming companies have taken place in the last three years, and the recent announcement of Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard broke all records.

The year started really hard. Not a week after Take-Two Interactive bought mobile game developers, Zynga, for $ 12.7 billion, Microsoft will take over the title of the biggest acquirer of any game publisher in history. The technology giant will pay $69 billion for the acquisition of renowned gaming company Activision Blizzard, making Microsoft one of the biggest players in the video game development market.

Activision Blizzard is an American video game company based in Santa Monica. It was founded in 2008 by merging Activision and Vivendi Games, and since 2015 it has been included in the S&P 500 index. Cost-effective acquisition

The company includes five business units: Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment, King, Major League Gaming and Activision Blizzard Studios, and their logo adorns series such as Call of Duty, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Transformers and Guitar Hero, as well as games Sekiro, Crash Bandicoot, Percy Jackson, How to Train Your Dragon, Bakugan ...

Until January 2022, Tencent’s $ 8.6 billion purchase of Supercell was the largest acquisition recorded in the video game industry. But then came the takeovers that heralded a turbulent business year in the gaming world. In the shadow of the already mentioned two biggest business moves, the news remained that Sony bought Bungie for 3.6 billion dollars these days. Great downloads

Acquisitions of billions of dollars worth of gaming companies are thus becoming the norm. Moreover, as many as ten of the 15 largest acquisitions have taken place in the last three years.

The acquisition of Activision Blizzard is the clearest sign of Microsoft’s ambition to become a giant in the gaming world as well. This merger would make Microsoft the third largest gaming company in the world, whose portfolio includes series such as the already mentioned Call of Duty, but also World of Warcraft.

After all, the Activision Blizzard takeover wasn’t the only big takeover Microsoft has embarked on lately. Two years ago, they bought ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion, and back in 2014, they set aside $2.5 billion for Mojang Studios, the company that designed Minecraft.

With the big acquisitions, Microsoft, among other things, wants to patch holes with weaker sales of the Xbox console, which looks back on far more successful PlayStation devices. Sony is now expected to respond by announcing that it will buy Bungie, the company behind Destiny.

Big money is at stake; even in the midst of a pandemic, in 2020, about 1,500 mergers and acquisitions worth $43 billion were recorded. Online gaming and streaming have become mainstream, and new projects related to building a metaverse will only further encourage further rethinking in the world of gaming.