Microsoft to Buy Activision Blizzard in Mega-Deal Worth $68.7 Billion

Microsoft announced a woody to bargain video-game subordinate Activision Blizzard for $68.7 cardinal successful cash. If it goes through, it would beryllium Microsoft’s biggest-ever acquisition — and by acold the biggest woody ever successful the video crippled biz.

Activision Blizzard’s lineup of games includes “Call of Duty,” “Candy Crush,” “Warcraft,” “Diablo,” “Overwatch” and “Hearthstone.” According to Microsoft, the woody volition accelerate the maturation its gaming concern crossed mobile, PC, console, and unreality and volition supply gathering blocks for the metaverse.

With Activision Blizzard, Microsoft would go the world’s third-largest gaming institution by revenue, down China’s Tencent and Sony. The woody is expected to adjacent successful Microsoft’s fiscal twelvemonth 2023 (which ends June 2023).

Activision Blizzard, successful summation to its halfway games improvement and publishing business, runs a planetary esports web done its Major League Gaming division. The institution has astir 10,000 employees worldwide.

The woody news, announced Tuesday, comes arsenic Activision Blizzard has been attempting to retrieve from a ungraded successful which the institution was accused of allowing a “pervasive frat lad workplace culture” to thrive that allegedly resulted successful women employees being continuously subjected to intersexual harassment and being paid little than men. Activision Blizzard has fired oregon “pushed out” much than 3 twelve employees for misconduct since past July, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“Gaming is the astir dynamic and breathtaking class successful amusement crossed each platforms contiguous and volition play a cardinal relation successful the improvement of metaverse platforms,” Microsoft president and CEO Satya Nadella said successful announcing the Activision Blizzard pact. “We’re investing profoundly successful world-class content, assemblage and the unreality to usher successful a caller epoch of gaming that puts players and creators archetypal and makes gaming safe, inclusive and accessible to all.”

Microsoft said that Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick volition proceed successful that role. Once the woody closes, Kotick volition study to Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming.

“Players everyplace emotion Activision Blizzard games, and we judge the originative teams person their champion enactment successful beforehand of them,” Spencer said successful a statement. “Together we volition physique a aboriginal wherever radical tin play the games they want, virtually anyplace they want.”