At last, Microsoft is responding to mobile calls. The software goliath is in a great position to make up for lost time, having missed much of the boom. Although CEO Satya Nadella’s two most recent acquisitions are a helpful boost, app wars are extremely risky.
Acquiring Activision, the creator of “Call of Duty” Microsoft has the same potential to improve its Xbox division and go into cellphones thanks to Blizzard. “Candy Crush Saga” is one of the company’s most precious assets and a significant factor in its $3.5 billion in projected mobile revenue for 2022.
According to research group Sensor Tower, the highly addictive tile-matching video game, which has been downloaded over 5 billion times since its release in 2012, continues to dominate the charts more than ten years later.
Microsoft now has an additional means of targeting the market with artificial intelligence. With its $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, Nadella should be able to reach out to more people outside of its core business clientele. In just two months after its launch, the chatbot had over 100 million users—the fastest rollout UBS analysts had witnessed in their twenty years of industry monitoring.
When combined, these two initiatives improve Microsoft’s capacity to analyze user behavior through the use of data gathered from in-app purchases and subscriptions to cloud gaming. It also intensifies rivalry, with various titans of technology vying with each other to match or exceed human intelligence.
Because of his increasing influence on mobile devices, Nadella feels confident enough to discuss the idea of launching Microsoft’s own game app store with partners. In an ongoing case against Apple and Google, the company previously gained some traction by testifying on behalf of “Fortnite” publisher Epic Games. The lawsuit claims that these companies’ monopoly power allows them to force developers to utilize proprietary payment systems that take a 30 percent cut of sales.
Meanwhile, the European Commission recently took aim at six tech “gatekeepers,” which may allow third parties to circumvent the two industry titans of operating systems. Microsoft’s strong brand might make its own Xbox store an alluring substitute and put Apple and Google’s fees in jeopardy. An estimated $17 billion, or 20%, of Apple’s services income in the year ending in September 2023 came from gaming.
Microsoft will come under further regulatory scrutiny if it continues to push its influence in the mobile space, as it has done for the past 25 years, when it was a defendant in a historic US antitrust lawsuit.
Gaining more market share should also change the course of another historical event for the better. A dozen years ago, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, laughed off the potential for the recently debuted iPhone. Nadella might still be laughing at this.
