The shock of the planned takeover of Activision Blizzard by Xbox is leaving its mark on PlayStation: shortly after the deal was announced, Sony had to cope with a heavy blow.
With the planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, which Microsoft wants to complete for almost 69 billion US dollars, Xbox could change the gaming industry permanently – and possibly weaken the competition significantly. PlayStation has already received a bitter taste, because Sony’s share price plummeted on Wednesday after the announcement.
PlayStation loses to Xbox deal
The Activision takeover by the competitor Xbox lets the alarm bells ring at Sony: On Wednesday the price of the Japanese company fell by 13 percent in the basement. The gaming giant lost 20 billion US dollars in market value in one go. The abrupt fall is the deepest drop in Sony stock since 2008. (Source: VGC)
In contrast to Activision Blizzard stock surged after the announcement and rose by a whopping 26 percent.
Microsoft takeover: Sony continues to hope for multi-platform games
The PlayStation camp is particularly worried about the prospect of Microsoft releasing some Activision franchises only on PC and Xbox in the future. the Losing a draft horse like Call of Duty would be extremely difficult to compensate for in terms of the number of players and financially. For the time being, however, this is unlikely to happen. In a comment, Sony says the company expects Microsoft to stick to existing contracts and thus continue to allow multi-platform releases. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
However, which contracts are meant by this and how long they will last was not mentioned in the statement. In principle, however, it can be assumed after the takeover that at least some of the Activision games have an Xbox exclusivity could become. However, it is not yet clear whether Call of Duty and Overwatch will also be affected by this – some industry insiders even assume that such a monopoly measure could result in the takeover deal itself failing.
In our video we show you eight games that we hope you can use to pass the time in 2022:
Xbox’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is making waves – and PlayStation is hitting it pretty hard. Following the announcement, Sony suffered a severe stock loss and is worried about the future of some popular gaming franchises.