For almost a year now, the industry has been operating under one major assumption about how the competitive landscape is going to look in the coming years – namely that by some point in 2023, Activision Blizzard would become a subsidiary of Microsoft, with the $68 billion acquisition seeing the giant publisher slotted in alongside Xbox Game Studios in Microsoft’s newly minted Gaming division.
The deal, initially announced back in January, would arguably be the most significant reordering of the games business since 2001, when Microsoft first entered the console market just months after Sega bowed out of the hardware business, and would make Microsoft’s games business into the third largest in the world by turnover, after Tencent and Sony.
After months of preparing for that eventuality and wrapping our heads around its implications, though, there are questions starting to be asked about the extent to which this deal is actually a fait accompli.
source https://www.gamesindustry.biz/what-happens-if-activision-blizzard-stays-independent-opinion
