Microsoft early Tuesday morning made a huge announcement in regards to acquiring Activision Blizzard the publisher for the Call of Duty Franchise for over 70 billion dollars.
Recent controversies revolving around Activision Blizzard have caused the stock price (ATVI) to drop over 36% to $57 from $99 which may have signaled Xbox/Microsoft to make a move in buying the publisher.
You may be wondering what this means for the future of the Call of Duty Franchise and when the sale of Activision will officially go thru, fortunately for you, we will be going over everything down below.
Activision STOCK has went up by $23 after the Xbox news… pic.twitter.com/yYe37UUFvo
— Call of Duty News (@WarzoneQG) January 18, 2022
When will the sale go thru?
According to the official Activision press release it notes that these types of transactions can take a long time and they expect the sale to go thru ‘…sometime in Microsoft’s fiscal 2023 year ending June 30, 2023’.
The reason it takes so long to go thru is that they need to receive all the necessary regulatory approvals and make sure other customary closing conditions are satisfied.
Until this actually goes thru Activision will still be independently operated, there’s a slight chance that some form of government doesn’t allow this to be finalized.
What will Microsoft own?
You may be wondering which titles will be acquired by the Microsoft team as well as which Developers they will overlook and fund.
This acquisition would give Xbox/Microsoft full ownership of games such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, Diablo, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Candy Crush.
Along with all those games they also have publishing rights to games created by Treyarch, Raven Software, High Moon, Sledgehammer, Infinity Ward, Beenox, Demon Ware, and Toys for Bob.
What does this mean for Call of Duty?
Microsoft will now have FULL control over the Call of Duty Franchise, so does this mean that it will be going onto the Xbox as an exclusive?
This is probably the number one question that most people have, I’m going to come out and say that this probably won’t happen just based on the fact that people would be pissed at Microsoft.
Adding onto that the CEO of Xbox Phil Spencer said that “It’s not our intent to pull communities away from that platform and we remained committed to that.”, adding onto this it’s probably a net positive for the Franchise.
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