Do You Get It Now? (Premium)

While Sony and most of the rest of the planet has been obsessed with Call of Duty for some reason, Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition is really about another, more important goal: setting up Xbox to expand past the limitations of standalone consoles. And the key component of that future is mobile gaming, a part of the market in which Xbox, today, has zero share.

To be fair, Microsoft, in particular Xbox head Phil Spencer, have been overtly clear about this aim since the beginning. But it’s equally clear that too many of us have been distracted by Call of Duty and Activision Blizzard’s other popular game franchises, and with some imagined future in which Microsoft, for some illogical reason, tries to limit their availability on competing platforms.

That was never going to happen, Sony’s increasingly histrionic complaints notwithstanding. But today’s news regarding the ease and speed at which Microsoft will create its own mobile game store on iPhone and Android the second that European regulators force those companies to stop being anticompetitive and open up their platforms is exactly the reminder that the world needs about what’s really at stake here.

And this is another thing that Microsoft, normally a stranger to clear communications, has been crystal clear about when it comes to Activision Blizzard. This deal isn’t about foreclosing beloved games from the PlayStation. It’s about improving Microsoft’s ability to make more games available to more people, no matter which platforms they use.

You don’t have to pay that much attention to see what Microsoft has already done along these lines in the wake of the Xbox One debacle. Under Phil Spencer, Xbox has expanded beyond its money-losing consoles with the Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription services, giving members an incredible library of games to install and play. It has also added Xbox Cloud Gaming, a perk of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, doing for gaming what streaming music services did for music.

These services help Xbox coexist in the broader Microsoft more comfortably than does, say, Windows, since they align neatly with Microsoft’s positioning a cloud computing superpower. But these services are also consumer-friendly, and they broaden the reach of Xbox and the titles under its umbrella in ways that just serving a small market for a single console never would. Put more simply, in the pre-Spencer days, Xbox was almost exclusively about the console. But thanks to Mr. Spencer, Xbox is now about gaming more generally. And the next step, the obvious step, is moving into mobile.

And it’s a big step. Mobile gaming has the potential to be bigger than everything else that Xbox does combined. Which makes it interesting—and not a little troubling—that its future fortunes lie entirely in the hands of antitrust regulators around the world. Regulators who will or will not approve its Activision Blizzard deal. And regulators who will or will not finally rein in Apple’s and Google’s many predatory and illegal business practices on mobile.

And as is so often the case, our hopes and dreams are centered on the EU, which is paradoxically more inclined to do the right thing and also frustratingly slow. But one gets the feeling that when the EU finally weighs in on Activision Blizzard and gives it the OK it deserves after whatever Microsoft “concessions,” that the UK CDMA and U.S. FTC will fall in line. Because doing otherwise will make them look stupid. Which they already do, since both today seem far more interested in protecting Sony’s dominant position in the console market than in just doing the right thing for competition and consumers.

That said, Microsoft isn’t entirely without blame. It’s in a weird position now in that it needs two sets of regulatory actions—the approval of the merger and the institution of the EU Digital Markets Act that will open up those mobile platforms—to both conclude in positive ways to pursue its mobile dreams. And yet, Microsoft, for all its resources, hasn’t and is not right now making a major push in mobile games on its own? Are you telling me that there are no games in its market-leading stable of studios that could be ported to mobile?

That, in some ways, is the real “hole” in Microsoft’s strategy. And I don’t understand, given the opportunity in mobile, how or why this hasn’t happened yet. Mobile platforms like the iPhone, iPad, and Android have long had the processing power to handle impressive, modern games. And Microsoft should have already been positioned for a future in which they sell those games, normally, through existing mobile apps stores, damn the fees. Not doing so doesn’t make sense.

In the end, it may not matter. But whether Activision Blizzard is approved or not, Microsoft should pivot on mobile as soon as possible. It should have already done so.