Pushing Buttons: the Microsoft-Activision deal is a chance to transform game development

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Well. There’s only one thing I was going to be talking about in this week’s Pushing Buttons, isn’t there? Since Microsoft very inconsiderately announced the biggest acquisition in gaming history just after last week’s edition went out, the entire games industry has been in a flap. The $69bn deal to buy Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Overwatch publisher Activision Blizzard absolutely dwarfs the $7.5bn that the house of Xbox paid for Zenimax/Bethesda in 2020, which already had me feeling slightly uneasy about the amount of cash being thrown around by giant corporations (see also Tencent, whose run of acquisitions shows no sign of slowing down.)

This is more money than either of Microsoft’s competitors in gaming – Sony and Nintendo – could dream of shelling out. The acquisition instantly wiped $20bn off Sony’s share price, which gives some indication of the sheer force of this power play. But as I wrote in an analysis of the deal last week, this is about much more than games consoles: Microsoft wants to control as much of the gaming market as possible in future, and it’s doing this through investing in content rather than hardware. The bet is that we’ll mostly be playing games via streaming subscription services in the not too distant future, and if you have to pay £15 a month or however much to play Call of Duty via Game Pass, that future will certainly arrive sooner.

Here’s what’s rankling me about this deal though, now that the dust is settling (and assuming that it gets past US regulators, who are supposedly