The Xbox Game Pass Deal: Announcing Microsoft’s Largest Acquisition of Games, Games, and Games to Play with a Wide-Scale Game Library

Microsoft has finalized its $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard, the publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo. The decision to close was made last week, and now it is official. The deal needed 20 months of battles between Microsoft and regulators in the US and the UK, but it was completed after Microsoft won a court fight against the FTC in the US.

The FTC case revealed a lot ofXbox secrets despite the initial announcement of the deal. The FTC is still appealing its failing to get a preliminary injunction to block Microsoft’s deal, with a decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals due in December

The games will be available on a variety of cloud gaming services thanks to the Microsoft deals. Those deals include:

We are eager to learn from their creativity, exchange insights and best practices, and empower our new colleagues to bring their visions to the widest possible audience. And today, we officially start the work of bringing more groundbreaking games to more players than ever before and across new platforms from mobile to cloud streaming. We also begin the work to make Activision, Blizzard, and King’s muchloved library of games available in Game Pass and other platforms — we’ll have more to share in the coming months.

The deal is Microsoft’s largest acquisition ever, far in excess of the $26 billion Microsoft paid to acquire LinkedIn in 2016 and the $7.5 billion it paid to acquire Bethesda in 2021. This is Microsoft’s biggest-ever push into gaming, too, and the company said at the original announcement of this megadeal that it will now be the “third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.”

Activision Blizzard made it clear earlier this week that Modern Warfare 3 and Diablo IV won’t be coming to Xbox Game Pass this year, though. The Xbox Game Pass number has not been updated since the announcement of 25 million subscribers.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick will remain in place to help with the transition until the end of 2023. Kotick told the employees in his email today that he is committed to helping with the transition. “Phil has asked me to stay on as CEO of ABK, reporting to him, and we have agreed that I will do that through the end of 2023. We are excited to work on a seamless integration of our teams and players.

A Special THANK YOU for Helping us Obtain the Right Game for a New Live Streaming Service. I’m excited to announce the deal with Ubisoft

I want to give a big thanks to everyone that helped make this acquisition possible. Without your work, we couldn’t have accomplished this.

I will be going to the offices of King and three other companies over the next few weeks. We’ll have the opportunity to welcome our new colleagues at our next virtual all-hands for Xbox employees, and for the greater Microsoft community, we’ll discuss this and more in the November 8 session of the Company Strategy Series.

It was one of the reasons Microsoft came to us; we were among the first studios to work for Stadia, Amazon had worked with Luna, and we also had partners with the graphics card maker NVIDIA. “To Microsoft, it made sense that if somebody was going to be familiar with the space and know what the value would be for streaming, it would be us. We had seen the value as well.

The deal with Ubisoft means that Activision Blizzard games will now be available on Ubisoft Plus, the company’s game subscription service. It is not known when these games will all be available, as work begins on bringing them to the subscription.

Even after 15 years, the licenses are up, so there is still a chance that the company could provide games to people and companies worldwide.

We have the right to license them to companies as well, as we expect that they will be on Ubisoft Plus. I think that there is a company somewhere in the world that might want to license those rights and make use of it to start up a new streaming service.