People say these acquisitions are to cut off some IPs from Sony's consoles...but honestly?
What Microsoft fears the most? Amazon, Apple, Google, etc acquiring one of these major publishers out of the blue and then THEY lose access to those IPs.
They are major players wanting desperately for a piece of this pie.
What Phil is saying is "we know Sony and Nintendo won't do that. The other bigger ones? You never know"
Ok. Now lets think about this for a second. Phil just spent $70 billion dollars, $82 if you count Minecraft and Zenimax, because he's afraid Google, Apple and Facebook will come in and remove CoD from Xbox. Do you really believe Phil would spend $70 billion just to keep CoD on Xbox?
Lets not even discuss the fact that Bobby Kotick did go to Facebook and shop around, and found no buyers other than Microsoft. Google already tried their hand at gaming and struck out. They just closed down both of the studios they opened. Amazon failed at creating that awful Moba game and dropped it immediately. Apple has shown ZERO interest in video games. MS had zero competition for the bidding rights to the biggest IP in gaming. What does that tell you?
If Microsoft was just saving gamers from the big bad trillion dollar companies, they would not have made Starfield and Elder Scrolls xbox exclusive. This is about console wars. This is about putting gamepass on the PS5 and Switch. There is really nothing more to it than that. He's creating a big bad boogeyman to hide the fact that he's that boogeyman. The fact of the matter is that no one else was interested in Activision. No desperation from Apple, Google or Amazon here.
Go look up the biggest acquisitions by Apple, Google, and Amazon. $13 billion tops. Most them are in the $2-3 billion range. No one is spending $70 billion on video games lol