{"id":1560510,"date":"2022-01-22T10:50:19","date_gmt":"2022-01-22T15:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gamingbolt.com\/?p=505838"},"modified":"2022-01-22T10:50:19","modified_gmt":"2022-01-22T15:50:19","slug":"the-activision-acquisition-announcement-reveals-the-relative-precariousness-of-sonys-position","status":"publish","type":"station","link":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/plato-data\/the-activision-acquisition-announcement-reveals-the-relative-precariousness-of-sonys-position\/","title":{"rendered":"The Activision Acquisition Announcement Reveals The Relative Precariousness of Sony\u2019s Position"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

E<\/span>arlier this month, Xbox Game Studios dropped a bombshell on the video games world, and announced that they would be acquiring Activision Blizzard<\/a>. While the beleaguered publisher is far more troubled now than they would have been a few years ago, owing to a dramatic contraction of output and game portfolio diversity and variety, as well as a year’s worth of controversies<\/a> surrounding a horrifically toxic work culture that allegedly imbibed racism, sexism and misogyny, death threats, and driving a worker to suicide, it is still a big get for Microsoft – Activision is still the publisher of arguably the biggest third party games franchise there is in\u00a0Call of Duty<\/em>, and the legacy catalog of games and IP that Activision and Blizzard give Microsoft, as well as the spate of new, talented studios (who will hopefully get better working conditions under Microsoft and Xbox), and the strong foot in the door for the mobile market with King and\u00a0Candy Crush<\/em>, make this a monumental purchase for the company. Indeed, at nearly $70\u00a0billion<\/em>, this is the single biggest acquisition Microsoft has ever made – not just for games or Xbox, across\u00a0anything<\/em>, ever.<\/p>\n

We covered some of the broader implications of this move in an earlier piece<\/a>, and if you are looking for a more holistic assessment of the situation, and what it may mean for the gaming industry, I encourage you to look at that. My interest with this acquisition, however, is in how starkly it reveals the precariousness of Sony and PlayStation’s position in the market at present – which sounds funny, given that they are currently more profitable than they have ever been, or that the PS5 has broken records for how successful it is this early on in its life cycle. But the fact of the matter is, Sony\u00a0is<\/em> suddenly in a precarious position in the market – and I think it is, ultimately, a consequence of the business moves and decisions they have been consciously making over the last decade, which slowly saw them singularly aligning themselves to fight for the western high end console market at the expense of everything else.<\/p>\n