Microsoft’s Phil Spencer Reveals Driving Forces Behind Activision Blizzard Acquisition

While the question of why Activision Blizzard decided to merge with Microsoft is easy enough to answer given the company’s current predicament, the reason behind the latter’s decision to acquire the controversial company still remains a mystery… until today.

In an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer revealed that the decision to acquire Activision Blizzard was primarily driven by Microsoft’s desire to secure a foothold in the highly-profitable mobile gaming market. Activision Blizzard, as you probably know, also owns King, the creator of the extremely popular Candy Crush mobile puzzle game. Blizzard Entertainment’s portfolio of high-grossing PC games came second on the list.

“The biggest gaming platform on the planet is mobile phones,” Spencer said. “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.”

“One thing about the video game space is if you’ve been around maybe too long, you know most of the creators out there. So you kind of know teams that could be a good fit in terms of what we were trying to do,” he added. “But we really started the discussions, internally at least, on Activision Blizzard around the capability they had on mobile and then PC with Blizzard.”

Spencer also talked about the history of Microsoft Gaming and how it was initially started as a defense against consoles taking over the PC market. He also touched on the recent controversies and scrutiny surrounding big tech companies and the regulation of huge deals like their ongoing merger with Activision Blizzard.

“Big deals should be scrutinized,” said Spencer. “I think that’s the role of regulators [and] why they’re in place. I feel good about the progress that we’ve been making, asking good, hard questions about: Ok, what’s our intent? If we play it out over five years is this constricting the market?”

On the topic of constricting markets, Spencer says that previous antitrust allegations against the company taught them a lesson that has stuck with them until today as one of the biggest advocates of cross-platform play.

You can check out Emily Chang’s full interview with Phil Spencer in the video below.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer on Bloomberg Studio 1.0