of video games, and this acquisition gets it much closer to that goal. Even before the Activision offer, Microsoft was copying Netflix's strategy of amassing original content to entice subscribers to pay for access to its Game Pass streaming service.
Microsoft has made it clear that it intends to bring as many Activision Blizzard games as possible to Game Pass to keep that number growing. If even a fraction of Activision Blizzard's 400 million monthly active users purchase a Game Pass subscription, Microsoft will leap ahead in the game-streaming race.Microsoft also wants to intertwine the worlds of consoles, PCs, and mobile devices to allow gamers to play anywhere.
Earlier this year, Take-Two Interactive acquired Zynga for $12.7 billion. In December, Embracer Group purchased Asmodee for $3.1 billion, one of an incredible 37 acquisitions by Embracer last year. In April, EA bought Glu Mobile for $2.4 billion. Sony customers may now wonder if buying their kids a $500 Playstation 5 to play the handful of exclusive games Sony produces every year is really a better deal than paying $300 for an Xbox Series S that their kid can play hundreds of Game Pass games on.
Even if Sony wanted to acquire studios, the company has less financial firepower. Microsoft had more than $130 billion in cash at the end of the last quarter, while Sony had about $44 billion. And Sony spent the better part of the last decade paying off debt and shoring up its balance sheet, so a massive new acquisition spree may be a stretch.
In an odd twist of fate, these classic Sony characters will soon be owned by Microsoft. Developer Insomniac Games and producer Universal Interactive Studios created Spyro for the original Playstation in 1998, while Crash Bandicoot, a name synonymous with Playstation, was developed by Naughty Dog in collaboration with Universal Interactive Studios.
Then again, after acquiring Mojang in 2014, Microsoft kept Minecraft cross-platform and didn't interfere with its availability on Playstation. But that was then, and this is now — and with names like Overwatch, Diablo, and of course Call of Duty at their fingertips, Microsoft must be awfully tempted to put as much content as possible behind the walled garden of Game Pass.
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