Microsoft has made plenty of acquisitions in recent years, and its games division head Phil Spencer believes there are still more to come.
Speaking with Bloomberg, Spencer said the company is still looking at third-party studios for potential purchase. No one specific developer was cited, but he did say large-scale purchases like Activision Blizzard and Bethesda were on pause, at least for now. By his own admission, there was “a lot of time” spent acquiring the Call of Duty publisher, which became complicated by local and international regulators initially stepping in to block it.
The acquisition went through last year, and resulted in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 becoming a big success as a day one Xbox Game Pass title. However, Xbox has also seen its share of controversial layoffs and closures across its subsidiaries, with one of the most recent being 650 roles eliminated this past September.
While Spencer stated no acquisitions were “imminent,” he expressed interest in both non-US and mobile studios. The former interests him because of “geographic diversity:” previously, Xbox attempted to get Chinese hits like Genshin Impact on the platform—which it will, next week—and he told Bloomberg there’s a “real opportunity to partner with creative teams in China for global [reach]. It’s been a good area for us to learn from creative teams that have real unique capability.”
As for mobile, the platform is part of the reason why Microsoft wanted to snatch up Activision Blizzard and Candy Crush creator King. In October, Tencent-owned TiMi released a mobile version of Xbox’s Age of Empires series, and he said Xbox “definitely wants to be in that [mobile] market. When we can find teams, technology, and capability that add to what we’re trying to do in games, absolutely we will keep our heads up.”
“To reach new players, we need to be creative and adaptive of new business models, new devices, new ways of access,” he continued. “We’re not going to grow the market with $1,000 consoles.”
According to Spencer, Xbox’s previously reported mobile store has been pushed back as the company continues researching the market. Despite recent progress that’s allowed for third-party app stores to exist on iOS and Android platforms, he said Microsoft is still exploring how to get the eventual Xbox mobile store on phones. A web store would get around the problem, but he acknowledged to Bloomberg that Microsoft “still has to have a way to find the store. I think just hoping ‘if we build it, they will come’ doesn’t work.”
Spencer’s full thoughts on expanding the Xbox platform, and its potential hardware future, can be read here.