Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer describes his company’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard as personally “daunting,” but downplays the influence it would give his team over the gaming industry.
Why it matters: The proposed $69 billion purchase would be the largest consolidation of gaming companies in history.
Meta's record-shattering Thursday stock drop — the company formerly known as Facebook lost a quarter of its market value, or more than $200 billion, in a flash — capped a crazy tech earnings season that left two seemingly contradictory takeaways: Tech firms now sit at the economy's core, yet they also can still be risky bets.
Why it matters: The first two years of the pandemic served to further accelerate the tech giants' climb after a decade of unprecedented growth. But we all know what they say about "what goes up."
Amazon on Thursday said it made more than $31 billion in advertising last year, a huge feat for the tech giant, which for years kept the size of its budding ad empire under wraps.
Why it matters: Amazon has one of the fastest-growing advertising businesses in the world. It now makes more money than Microsoft, Snapchat and Twitter combined on advertising annually.
Snap Inc.'s stock jumped more than 50% in after-hours trading Thursday after the tech giant posted its first-ever quarterly net profit as a public company, while also beating Wall Street estimates on revenue and user growth.
Why it matters: Snapchat's massive beat stands in stark contract to Facebook, which lost more than $200 billion in market value yesterday after reporting weak first quarter guidance, attributable in part to changes to Apple's privacy policies, impacting Facebook's ad business.
Nintendo has now sold 103.5 million Switches, surpassing the 101.6 million sales performance of its legendary Wii console, the company announced overnight.
Why it matters: The show of strength signals just how much life is in Nintendo’s nearly 5-year-old platform, as it picked up about a fifth of those sales last year.
GameStop is creating an NFT marketplace and setting up a fund of “up to $100 million,” in partnership with blockchain company Immutable, in an effort to attract game developers to sell NFT-based items through the service.
Why it matters: GameStop, which still doesn’t have a clear path to success, has been teasing an NFT play for some time.
If you're not waking up every day thinking about health care, that's a big problem, according to Geeta Nayyar, the chief medical officer of Salesforce. "Every business is a health care business now," she tells Axios.
Why it matters: Salesforce's roughly two-decade history in health care notwithstanding, the pandemic has vaulted the company's role in keeping employees safe and healthy to new heights.
A bill that would upend how Apple and Google run their mobile app stores easily made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.
Driving the news: Senators on the committee voted to pass the Open App Markets Act 20-2, with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) voting no.
Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer’s career origin story — a chance encounter with a college classmate’s dad, who was a VP at Microsoft and offered him an internship — plays differently these days, and he knows it.
Why it matters: As head of Xbox since 2014, Spencer is already one of the most influential and powerful people in gaming, but he finds himself at a pivotal point both in his career and in the industry at large.
Andreessen Horowitz is in advanced talks to lead a large funding round for Yuga Labs, the company behind the NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club, Axios has learned from multiple sources.
Why it matters: Bored Apes is among the most popular community-based NFTs, below CryptoPunks and above Pixel Vault (which just raised $100 million of its own). Last week, Justin Bieber paid $1.29 million for a Bored Ape, while another last year sold for $3.4 million at Sotheby's.
Apple and Google’s control over the mobile apps market faces increasingly strong challenges, with a Senate committee poised to advance a tough new bill in the U.S. and the gatekeeper-app-store model showing signs of wear across the globe.
Driving the news: The Open App Markets Act, which Apple and Google are fighting, is expected to win Senate Judiciary Committee approval Thursday.
Meta on Wednesday said the Facebook app lost roughly 1 million daily active users in the most recent quarter — its first ever drop.
Why it matters: The numbers reinforce the sense, inside and outside the company, that the Facebook social network is now a legacy product for Meta, where the focus has shifted to newer realms like messaging, Instagram video and the metaverse.
