Those who were questioning the motives and reasons for Microsoft’s big juicy buyout offer of Activision-Blizzard need not wonder any longer. An interview with Microsoft CEO Phil Spencer reveals that the acquisition was chiefly driven by the company’s desire to get into the highly profitable mobile gaming space.
According to Spencer, internal talks at Microsoft focused on ActiBlizz’s established mobile games, followed by Blizzard’s existing PC games. Microsoft’s gaming wing is known primarily for its console and PC gaming offerings, but the company’s mobile games selection is considerably less robust.
“The biggest gaming platform on the planet is mobile phones,” Spencer says in the interview. “One and a half billion people play on mobile phones. And I guess, regretfully as Microsoft, it’s not a place where we have a native platform as gaming. Coming from console and PC, we don’t have a lot of creative capability that has built hit mobile games.”
