Microsoft's huge Activision Blizzard deal has always been seen as a bit of a money-maker for the Xbox owner, especially with such valuable franchises in-play across Activision, Blizzard and indeed King. Series' such as Call of Duty, Candy Crush and World of Warcraft will bring in lots of additional revenue for Xbox, and a new study from gaming data firm Newzoo shows that if Microsoft's first half of 2023 numbers included ActiBlizz, they'd have overtaken PlayStation in gaming revenue.
Indeed, the analytics firm has shared a new chart (as part of wider study) that shows Microsoft + Activision Blizzard's H1 2023 figures when paired up. When banded together, their gaming revenue would only come second in the entire industry - to mammoth Chinese entity Tencent.
If you remove ActiBlizz from the year's chart, Microsoft falls behind both PlayStation and Apple Gaming - coming in at fourth place for the first half of 2023. That's quite the boost then, and as you can see by the above chart, they'd be quite a ways in front of PlayStation too.
Of course, Activision Blizzard wasn't officially a part of Xbox for the first half of this year, so these numbers are more of a hypothetical look at company revenues if and when the companies merged. That merger has now happened, so the stats for H1 2024 will likely look something like this - at least in terms of each company's position within the chart.
Microsoft's ActiBlizz purchase price of $69 billion has always seemed vast, but these sorts of studies show exactly why Xbox went after such a company to bolster its position in the market. Activision Blizzard sure did cost a lot, but it'll bring in loads of extra revenue for Microsoft and Team Xbox.