The shares of the Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony, owner of PlayStation, have fallen 12.79% on the Tokyo Stock Exchange this Wednesday, after yesterday the agreement was known by which Microsoft, owner of Xbox, will buy the video game developer Activision Blizzard for 68,700 million dollars (60,326 million euros).
The transaction will allow Microsoft to take ownership of popular video game sagas such as ‘Call of Duty’, ‘Warcraft’, ‘Diablo’, ‘Overwatch’ or ‘Candy Crush’ and incorporate the publisher’s catalog into its subscription system. Game Pass’, which recently reached the figure of 25 million subscribers.
The acquisition comes a year after Microsoft bought another prominent company in the video game sector such as Bethesda for 7,500 million dollars (6,571 million euros) and propels the Redmond giant to the third position worldwide in the video game sector by income, behind China’s Tencent and Japan’s Sony.
Sony plans to publish the accounts of its third fiscal quarter, which runs from October to December and includes the Christmas campaign, on February 2.
Other video game companies, such as EA or Take Two, registered increases of 2.66% and 0.96%, respectively, while Nintendo titles yielded 0.22% and those of Ubisoft 0.56% before the possibility of further consolidation movements in the sector.
