It’s been a big week in gaming. On January 18, we felt seismic waves ripple through the industry as Microsoft announced that it was set to acquire Activision Blizzard; the beleaguered company behind some of gaming’s biggest IP that has recently been embroiled in a messy, public discrimination and harrassment lawsuit brought by the state of California.
After the news broke, we started to piece together more elements of the story: whether it was unpopular Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick saying he will be “available as needed” at Activision Blizzard “to ensure the very best integration”, or Microsoft saying that it’s not the company’s “intent to pull communities away” from PlayStation, a lot of our early questions about the merger began to see some answers.
But there’s still a lot we don’t know; what does this mean for Activision Blizzard games on non-Xbox platforms? Will Microsoft start offering games made by its 30 internal studios (that’s how many it’ll have, should the deal go through) to other platforms? Could we even see Microsoft extend Game Pass to other places, given the company’s end-game seems to be subscribers more than anything else?