Phil Spencer, who joined Microsoft as an intern in 1988 and rose up to lead the games business, was instrumental in the Activision Blizzard purchase
."It is an extraordinary amount of money for Microsoft, whose core business is not gaming," said Don Coyner, who was the first person to work on marketing inside the company's Xbox unit.Phil Spencer, chief executive officer of gaming at Microsoft Corp., center, arrives to court in San Francisco on June 28, 2023.Less than a decade later, Spencer and the Xbox are at the center of the software company's largest acquisition ever.
Regulatory pushback from the European Commission and agencies in the U.S. and U.K. kept the deal at bay for nearly 21 months and forced Microsoft and Activision to extend the deadline to close, which had been mid-July, by three months. Bobby Kotick , CEO of Activision Blizzard at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 11, 2023 in Sun Valley, Idaho.Spencer has been vocal in touting Activision's strengths and was a key force in driving the deal. He's enjoyed a years-long relationship with Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, even though the companies have had some tense moments.
Spencer has long understood the importance of top-shelf content. He was instrumental in getting Nadella onboard with the purchase of Minecraft developer Mojang, which Microsoft acquired in 2014 for $2.5 billion. Minecraft has since become the best-selling video game, with over 300 million copies sold as of, the publisher of Doom and Fallout games, in 2021. And at one point he was working on a bid for Warner Bros.
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