ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

Microsoft still wants to buy more games studios

Microsoft still wants to buy more games studios

Software giant Microsoft is still thinking about buying yet more games studios.

That's according to Cnet, who spoke to the Big M's CEO Satya Nadella (pictured) as well as the head of Xbox Phil Spencer, with the former apparently saying that the company wants to acquire more developers.

This comes in the wake of Microsoft announcing that it was buying Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media for a whopping $7.5bn earlier this week. In the process, the firm's Xbox Game Studios first-party line-up goes from 15 developers to 23, and the Big M brings blockbuster IP like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls and Doom into its stable.

"You can't wake up one day and say, 'Let me build a game studio,'" Nadella said. "The idea of having content is so we can reach larger communities."

Spencer added: "Content is just the incredible ingredient to our platform that we continue to invest in. This doubles the size of our creative organisation."

The acquisition of Bethesda follows a long line of Microsoft purchases in recent years. At E3 2018, the Xbox firm announced that it had bought Playground, Ninja Theory, Compulsion and Undead Labs, in addition to setting up a new studio in Santa Monica called The Initiative. Later that year, the Big M bought RPG giants InXile and Obsidian, before revealing it had purchased adventure games specialist Double Fine at E3 2019 and setting up a division to look after the Age of Empires IP.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.