After Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard, Sony had big problems – their shares and market value has dropped in just one day.
On the 18th of January, Microsoft announced that Activision Blizzard was theirs. After that, Sony’s market shares have fallen by nearly 13% in Japan in 24 hours.
The deal cost $69 billion, being the highest amount of money any company has paid for an acquisition. So Microsoft now owns Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Crash Bandicoot, and many others. The company now has 24 game studios, and Microsoft is in today’s top 3 biggest game companies.
Of course, the deal put a lot of pressure on Sony, considering that the industry dominance game is very powerful nowadays.
Microsoft and Sony have been part of a long competition in the market. The Xbox-PlayStation war has shown us a lot of great content. We’re also familiar with their rival games subscription services.
And now, since Microsoft has got Activision Blizzard, Xbox could have an even broader list of exclusives. Call of Duty or Diablo is on the line here, so Sony is put under a lot of pressure now – they might have to remove those games from their console.
Of course, a limited game library could hurt Sony, but they would still have more subscribers than Microsoft does. Sony has stated that their PS Plus service had 47.2 million subscribers back in 2021. Microsoft stated that Game Pass had 25 million subscribers.
Sony’s PlayStation 5 has been competing with the Xbox Series X|S ever since it was launched. Also, PS5 has actually outsold the Xbox in Japan in 2021, and even now, manufacturers struggle a lot to meet the demand.
So yes, the market value has dropped for Sony, but it’s not the end of the world – they are still holding on strong.
