Phil Spencer believes that in the future the mobile market will be fundamental for Xbox (and beyond).
Since when Microsoft (Xboxes) announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King many believed that this operation had been set up by the giant of Redmond to get your hands on the most important franchises of the American publisher, where among these it is literally impossible not to immediately think of call of Duty.
According to Phil Spencer, the mobile market will be necessary to make the Xbox business sustainable in the future
But in reality things are quite different, given that according to the statements shared in these hours by Phil SpencerCEO of Microsoft Gamingthe company he led wants to acquire Activision Blizzardagainst an investment of $68.7 billionmainly to attack the market mobile thanks to the division King. This is because according to him in the future the business of Xboxes will even become “unsustainable” without the rich revenues from the mobile market.
Phil Spencer in fact, he said the following during The Verge’s Decoder podcast:
“The idea that Activision is focused only on Call of Duty seems to have been created by our competitor in the console arena (almost certainly refers to Sony, ed). I don’t think anyone needs a precise statement from us to understand how irrelevant we are in the mobile market.
Anyone who picks up the phone and decides to play a title will figure it out on their own. And on PC too, our trials and tribulations over the last five to develop games are well documented, and we continue to work on it, and I love the work done by the Xbox app team and our PC studios as they are doing such a great job. work, but it takes time to get excellent results.
As for the Activision opportunity, and I keep saying this over and over, and it’s true, it definitely starts with the idea that people want to play games on all the devices they already have, and they want to do it in a satisfying way.
The smallest screen we play games on is actually the largest screen when you think about the installed base of smartphones. That’s just one place where if we don’t gain prominence as a gaming brand – we’re not the only ones to see that – over time, the gaming business will become somewhat unsustainable, for all of us.
If we can’t find customers on phones, on whatever screen someone wants to play games on, you’re bound to become a player in the niche video game market, with running a global business going to be very challenging. As a percentage of the overall video game business, the console business is shrinking, because the overall business is growing and consoles remain relatively flat as a business, and the same is true with PCs as well.
And then when you look at the biggest game companies out there, Tencent is the largest game company in the world, a large part of their revenue comes from mobile, and then you put their commercial success that they’ve earned through work, which they made their way back into the market by acquiring other studios, at a very fast pace.“