Strategic Motivation and Effectiveness Analysis of Microsoft's Acquisition of Activision Blizzard - An Empirical Study Based on Valuation and M&A Performance

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-874-5_141How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Strategic Mergers and Acquisitions; Microsoft-Activision Blizzard Acquisition; Platform Ecosystem Expansion

Abstract

As global technology companies become increasingly competitive in content and platform integration, strategic mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have become an important means for large corporations to rapidly expand their ecosystems and technological capabilities. In 2022, Microsoft announced that it had acquired Activision Blizzard, a globally recognized gaming company, for approximately $68.7 billion, making it the largest M&A in the gaming industry to date. This paper takes this M&A event as the research object and systematically analyzes the motivation, valuation reasonableness and its impact of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. By analyzing the financial impact and market reaction of Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard, this paper points out that the deal will not only help Microsoft strengthen its layout in the mobile game and cloud game market, but also further enhance its content ecosystem and subscription service integration capability. The study shows that the acquisition embodies the typical strategic path of platform-based technology enterprises to acquire content resources and realize user ecological stickiness through acquisition, which is an important revelation for the future trend of M&A in the technology industry.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Tong Tong
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/11/03
TI  - Strategic Motivation and Effectiveness Analysis of Microsoft's Acquisition of Activision Blizzard - An Empirical Study Based on Valuation and M&A Performance
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Financial Innovation and Marketing Management (FIMM 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1239
EP  - 1252
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-874-5_141
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-874-5_141
ID  - Tong2025
ER  -