San Francisco/Tokyo | Microsoft’s audacious $US75 billion ($104.5 billion) move on games publisher Activision Blizzard has detonated a bomb under the games industry.
Along with the proposed deal’s sheer size, the prospect of a tech giant worth more than $US2 trillion making a grab for games industry leadership has prompted breathless speculation about whether it will precipitate a wider industry realignment.
According to some, the deal, announced last week, will greatly add to forces that have already been reshaping the sector in recent years, including the streaming of games, leading to the creation of ever-larger gaming empires.
The huge size of today’s gaming audience, which already dwarfs other forms of mass-market entertainment, is playing to the strengths of companies that can build and manage giant online businesses to spread their costs, according to Bing Gordon, a long-time video game executive and venture capitalist.
“The new critical mass is bigger than ever,” he says. Comparing pressures building up in the games industry to the streaming video wars that are reshaping the TV and movie business, he adds: “Someone’s going to create a games service with hundreds of millions of subscribers.”
