When Microsoft announced it was spending $69 billion to buy video game maker Activision Blizzard in January last year, Justin Kats was stunned.
For Kats, a 34-year-old former professional video game player from Lansing, Illinois, it was a seismic event that allowed Microsoft to claim victory over Sony in the console business by landing Activision’s slate of popular games, such as Call of Duty. .
“I thought there’s no way, this can’t be,” he said. “Are the console wars over? Does Xbox win? Kats, who now streams video games recreationally on Twitch under the name FearItSelf for Evil Geniuses, a professional gaming organization, was concerned that Microsoft, which makes the Xbox, would take Call of Duty away from people who played on Sony’s PlayStation consoles. .
But over the past year, Kats has been encouraged by Microsoft’s plans to keep Call of Duty available on PlayStation and by its deals to bring the game to Nintendo Switch and other platforms. With the deal finally closed on Friday after a global regulatory battle, Kats, like many other players, is now cautiously optimistic about Microsoft taking over one of the gaming industry’s biggest publishers.
“There’s a lot of energy and hype and attention,” Kats said, “but with that comes skepticism, and expectations are much higher because all this money was spent.”
The process of obtaining regulatory approvals for a corporate merger is often a tedious job, observed only by the most business and antitrust enthusiasts. The same is not true of Microsoft’s deal with Activision, which has captured the attention of millions of video game enthusiasts.
players flooded a British regulatory agency With over 2000 public comments, he spent countless hours on YouTube viewing legal analysis of the government’s attempts to block the deal and packed the Zoom audience for a federal court hearing on the acquisition in June.
Three-quarters of those who emailed the British agency said they were eager to see Microsoft complete its deal. Many were convinced that the transaction would boost Activision’s game development and give players access to premium games at a cheaper price through Microsoft’s monthly subscription.
Gamers have also expressed hope that Activision, which was accused in a 2021 lawsuit of having a sexist work culture, will improve its treatment of Microsoft-owned employees. Some PlayStation players who fear that the quality of their platform will now fall behind that of Xbox, however, remain concerned.
The acquisition was one of the most dramatic events in the history of the video game console wars, a long-running dispute between PlayStation and Xbox players that is similar to interactions between fans of rival sports teams.
Gamers are notoriously opinionated and have weighed in on aspects of the deal ranging from the future of Activision CEO Bobby Kotick to the Federal Trade Commission’s difficulty understanding the gaming industry when it took Microsoft to court in a attempt to block the agreement. transaction.
Player interest in the transaction has been so strong that it appeared repeatedly in federal court. A Microsoft lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, suggested that the company could not afford the hit to its reputation if it failed to keep its promises to keep Call of Duty available on PlayStation.
“They couldn’t face the anger of the players,” he testified.
In recent years, Microsoft has tried to improve its image among gamers, positioning itself as less concerned about competing with Sony and more focused on removing barriers to gaming by offering low-cost products like Xbox Game Pass, the $11-a-month subscription.
It has said its acquisition of Activision is good for the industry, although government regulators like the FTC argued the purchase was anticompetitive and some of Microsoft’s shares Private communications that were revealed in court. showed that the tech giant was more interested in fighting Sony by keeping exclusive games for its Xbox ecosystem than it had let on.
On Friday, Microsoft said closing the deal would increase access to Activision games.
“We believe our news today will unlock a world of possibilities for more ways to play,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer wrote in a blog post.
Many players are confident that Microsoft will keep its word and believe that the deal will be good for the industry. Ross Varner, an information technology consultant in Houston, said he and other gamers he knew thought Microsoft would likely improve Activision’s corporate culture while giving the developer the freedom and time to produce games. quality.
“Because Activision has basically been a Call of Duty machine for the last few years, they’re hoping that Microsoft will get them back into franchises they haven’t touched in a long time,” said Varner, 35, who plays both on Xbox as on PlayStation.
Sony, which declined to comment on the deal closing, had opposed the deal with Activision, concerned that Microsoft could remove Call of Duty from PlayStation or downgrade the game on its platforms, even though Microsoft has said it would not. will do. After the FTC’s efforts to stop the deal failed in July, Sony agreed to a 10-year deal with Microsoft to keep the game on PlayStation. But PlayStation loyalists are still nervous.
“It makes me feel like I need to switch to a completely different ecosystem to be able to play the games I already played,” said Johnathan Schoepf, a human resources specialist in Cincinnati who is primarily a PlayStation gamer.
Schoepf, 25, said he hoped future Activision games would be exclusive to Xbox, just as new games have been from Bethesda, a developer Microsoft acquired in 2020.
“It’s a bit like we’ve been stabbed in the back,” he said. “Microsoft has come in and consolidated a large part of the industry, two of the major publishing studios, and is now restricting their production on rival consoles.”
Kats, the former professional gamer, said he was optimistic but was reserving judgment until he saw exactly how Microsoft handled the development of future iterations of key franchises like Call of Duty.
“The grass isn’t always greener just because another tech giant has taken the reins,” he said.