Microsoft buys Activision/I interview a YouTube designer

We've all achieved something this week

The relationship between the new concept of the ‘metaverse’, a very 2022 buzzword, and the existing world of video games has, I suspect, been under-discussed. There have been a few jokey tweets pointing out the similarities between Mark Zuckerberg’s new vision for an immersive workspace and the 00s classic Habbo Hotel, but little serious analysis by tech-watchers of what the similarities and differences between these two products are and will be.

To the headline news: Microsoft has launched an intended takeover bid of Activision Blizzard, the video games publisher, for $68.5 billion. That staggering fee would give Microsoft (the owner of Xbox, if that requires saying in 2022) access to Activision Blizzard’s library of intellectual property, which includes Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Candy Crush. It will also give them a further foothold in the esports and collaborative gaming space, as Blizzard were the founders of the Overwatch League, perhaps the world’s premier esports competition, which airs on ESPN and had its grand finals at the Barclays Center.

First, the fee: $68.5bn. Sixty-eight billion dollars. Somehow, writing it like that does it less justice than typing out the zeros. 68,500,000,000. Dollars. That’s roughly the nominal GDP of the Ivory Coast. It’s a cool $8bn more than the UK’s defence spending last year ($60,455,255,400). It is set to become the biggest tech deal in history, surpassing Dell’s $67bn acquisition of EMC (a monolithic data storage and management solution) in 2016. It’s an unignorable amount of money, and, as such, is raising antitrust eyebrows, with critics of the deal sensing that an attempt at monopoly busting could bear fruit.

It’s also so much bloody money that the recent history of Activision Blizzard is coming back under the microscope. Last year, the company was accused, in a report by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, of a workplace culture that fostered sexual harassment, employment discrimination and retaliation. In an industry attempting to deal with the fallout from Gamergate and the sense that women, particularly, were marginalised, and far worse, at work, it was another body blow. Activision Blizzard, the world’s biggest video game company, became a byword for the frat boy culture that was necessarily on the way out.