January was marked by a number of high-profile acquisitions in the gaming industry. Game publisher Take-Two took over Zynga (best known for mobile games FarmVille and Mafia Wars) for $12.7 billion. Microsoft (produces the Xbox console) bought Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion (among its hits are World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Diablo). And at the end of the month, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced a $3.6 billion takeover of video game maker Bungie, famous for shooters Destiny and Halo. Ironically, Bungie is the same company that in the early 2000s. was part of Microsoft and helped launch in 2001 the worst rival of the PlayStation – the Xbox console.
Some of the analysts have already started talking about the aggravation of the console war. The fact is that in the 2010s. Sony Interactive Entertainment made only three acquisitions: the British Media Molecule in 2010 and the American Sucker Punch Productions in 2011 and Insomniac Games in 2019. During the same time, Microsoft bought as many as eight studios.