Microsoft to launch mobile game store in July

Microsoft will launch a web-based mobile game store in July, seeking to compete with Apple‘s App Store and the Google Play store.

Speaking at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday, Xbox president Sarah Bond said the store will be “accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what, independent of the policies of closed ecosystem stores.”

The store will launch with Microsoft’s own games and additional content for said games. Eventually, the store will be open to third-party publishers as well.

“This web-based store is the first step in our journey to building a trusted app store with its roots in gaming,” an Xbox spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Microsoft has discussed the possibility of launching such a store for some time, largely in the wake of the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which included mobile giant King, the company behind Candy Crush.

While the Activision deal was often framed as Microsoft seeking to acquire Call of Duty, Xbox’s boss Phill Spencer has consistently claimed that the transaction was primarily driven by the company’s mobile gaming ambitions.

In November 2022, Spencer went as far as to say that the Xbox business would become “untenable” if it remained “irrelevant” on mobile.

“There’s just no way to really plot the future without being on the platform that most of the planet plays on,” Spencer said in November 2023. “The games are different, the business models are different, the whole dynamic of how you distribute, how you find games is different.

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"We look at a whole variety of factors", Sarah Bond says

“So, when I was looking at that, I needed to find a team that’s had amazing success for us to learn from. So literally we just—Amy Hood, who’s the CFO of Microsoft, and I—went through a list of who are the most accomplished publishers in the mobile space.

“And most people wouldn’t have expected, I think—I didn’t—that Activision would have been as high, with the King work, as well as the Call of Duty Mobile work, Warzone stuff, that they’ve been doing, Diablo Immortal.”