Speaking in an interview with the Financial Times ahead of San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference 2023, CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer teased the arrival of an Xbox games store on mobile devices next year if the company can successfully convince regulators to clear the deal with Activision Blizzard.
We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play. Today, we can’t do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up. The Digital Markets Act that’s coming — those are the kinds of things that we are planning for. I think it’s a huge opportunity.
It’s not the first time Phil Spencer talked about the importance of mobile games when it came to greenlighting the $68.7 billion deal for Activision Blizzard. In November, he said:
In terms of the Activision opportunity — I keep saying this over and over, and it is true — it definitely starts with a view that people want to play games on every device that they have. In a funny way, the smallest screen that we play on is actually the biggest screen when you think about the install base in a phone.
That’s just a place where if we don’t gain relevancy as a gaming brand, over time, the business will become untenable. We’re not alone in seeing this; this is true for any of us. If you’re not able to find customers on phones or on any screen that somebody wants to play on, then you really are going to get segmented to a niche part of gaming where running a global business will become very challenging. It’s critical that if you’re trying to run an at-scale global gaming business, you meet your customers where they want to play, and mobile is more and more that place.
Candy Crush and the King arm of ABK are as important as Call of Duty, if not more so, in Microsoft’s eyes. Furthermore, the company is banking on the EU’s Digital Markets Act to push its own store on iOS and Android. Apple, for example, is already preparing to comply with the EU ruling and allow third-party stores on iOS.
Of course, Spencer also hinted that the Xbox games store for mobile devices will materialize if and when regulators clear the Activision Blizzard deal. That’s still very much unclear, as the UK’s CMA will only share its ruling next month, while the European Union equivalent is rumored to be willing to approve the deal. Meanwhile, the US FTC is probing Microsoft for documentation on the recent contracts it made with the likes of Nintendo, NVIDIA, Boosteroid, and Ubitus to bring Call of Duty (and, in the last three, all of its Xbox games, too) to these platforms.
