Xbox is in discussions with partners about launching a mobile store

Xbox is in discussions with partners about launching a new mobile game store, Microsoft’s head of gaming Phil Spencer has confirmed.

Prior to completing its acquisition of Activision Blizzard last month, Microsoft said the $69 billion deal would improve its ability to create a “new Xbox mobile platform” and a “next generation game store” to compete with Google Play and the App Store.

“It’s an important part of our strategy and something we are actively working on today not only alone, but talking to other partners who’d also like to see more choice for how they can monetise on the phone,’’ Spencer told Bloomberg this week.

Asked when Microsoft might launch its mobile marketplace, he said: “I don’t think this is multiple years away, I think this is sooner than that.”

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

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

Following the completion of the game industry’s biggest ever deal, Xbox has a major presence in mobile gaming as the owner of Candy Crush maker King and titles including Call of Duty Mobile and Diablo Immortal.

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

“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.

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Xbox exec says Microsoft wants to bring Game Pass to PlayStation and Nintendo

Its “mission” is to have its first-party experiences on “every screen that can play a game”

“And so, I want to go learn from those teams because I think it’s critical for us to deliver on the full promise of over two billion people playing, the opportunity to reach more of three billion people playing video games, to reach more and more people, that people who only play on their phone find Xbox to be something that’s interesting for them.

“It doesn’t mean I want to turn all of our franchises into mobile franchises,” he continued. “It doesn’t mean everything’s going to go free-to-play. I think the distribution and business model diversity that we have is a strength of the platform.”