Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is set to drive an incredible number of users toward its Xbox and PC Game Pass services.
This is what infamous games industry analyst Michael Pachter seems to think, anyway, having appeared on Yahoo Finance recently to offer his thoughts on Microsoft’s pending deal, which is estimated to cost the Windows and Xbox maker $69 billion. While that’s an eye-watering amount of money, Pachter seems pretty convinced that it’ll be worth it, stating with confidence during the call that Activision’s titles will boost Game Pass subscriptions to 100 million when they’re inevitably added in the event that regulators agree to give the green light.
Here’s what the Wedbush Securities analyst had to say:
Microsoft had a vision years ago that I thought was stupid, that they were going to come up with a subscription service, and everybody would pay them for the right to play games. And they just didn’t have very many games.
Then they went on a buying spree, and they bought six independent studios, the biggest of which is Obsidian. They’re very, very good. But then they bought Bethesda, which is a giant studio, and now they’re buying Activision. When they’re done, they are the fourth major game publisher in the US. So they’re going to be giant, and they’re going to be in a position to actually support their Game Pass subscription.
Their future vision is, let’s eliminate the console. Let’s use the cloud, and let’s deliver games to any screen that you have. And that potential market is 3 and 1/2 billion people. So I don’t think they’ll get that many Game Pass subscribers, but will they go from 25 million to 100 million? Yes.
Whether that will actually happen is probably still in the air, especially considering Pachter’s notorious record, but the analyst goes on to suggest that the deal itself, at the very least, is probably happening whether some people like it or not.
I can confidently state that the FTC has no legal basis to challenge this. They might try. But the basis for a challenge here would be that if Microsoft were to complete its acquisition of Activision, that they would pull games off of Sony’s Playstation platform. And Microsoft has already blogged and tweeted we won’t do that. We have contracts. We’ll honor them.
Michael Pachter is best known to many gamers as the guy who makes wild predictions that usually turn out to be completely false. Some of the analyst’s most notorious claims include Nintendo being driven out of the console business, and how the Wii wouldn’t do that well because of its motion controls. That turned out to be one of the best-performing consoles of all time, now only ranking behind the PS2, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and various Nintendo handhelds with over 100 million units sold.
Microsoft reported in January that Game Pass had over 25 million subscribers.
Source: Yahoo Finance