Global Metaverse

“When this [Activision] transaction closes, Microsoft Gaming will be the world’s number-three gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony,”
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Microsoft on Thursday, April 21 officially launched PC Game Pass in the Philippines and four other Southeast Asian countries, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The subscription service offers gamers access to a library of over a hundred PC titles, including new releases from Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda on day one, for a monthly fee.

Choose your Xbox Game Pass Subscription. Select from console or PC, multiplayer network, or the Ultimate Game Pass with Xbox Live Gold plus over 100 high-quality games.
PC Game Pass includes games like Halo Infinite, Age of Empires IV, Back 4 Blood, Forza Horizon 5, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Minecraft, and Sea of Thieves, among others. It’ll additionally include future Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks titles on day one like Starfield. EA Play is also included with the service, the service, featuring entries from franchises like FIFA, Battlefield, The Sims and Mass Effect.
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In Microsoft's Activision deal, it's not just stock prices but a future world at stake
Activision's stock price hinges on Microsoft's planned acquisition and billionaire investor Warren Buffett is betting on it. There's a future world at stake. me head-scratching across the big tech and gaming worlds in January when Microsoft announced an agreement to buy Activision Blizzard, a leading videogame publisher, for $68.7 billion. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella framed its largest acquisition ever as a boost to the company’s growing metaverse strategy, even though Activision is best known for blockbuster games such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush, but not the mix of AR/VR and other technology underpinning the fledgling metaverse.
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Sepso points to several other games that incorporate metaverse elements, such as Roblox, Fortnite, Second Life and Microsoft’s Minecraft. On those platforms, players can teleport between millions of games, build virtual social spaces and even attend concerts — all while purchasing virtual stuff to heighten the experience. Most of these types of games require VR headsets and consoles, which favors Microsoft, with its HoloLens and Xbox hardware.That’s where Microsoft’s software, cloud computing, gaming and virtual technologies position the company well. And adding Activision’s gaming capabilities only enhances its outlook.

According to Gartner, the market is dominated by five vendors who account for nearly 80% of worldwide IaaS cloud market share in 2018. These vendors are Amazon (47.8%), Microsoft (15.5%), Alibaba (7.7%), Google (4.0%) and IBM (1.8%).

You then of course also have other providers that also offer computing capabilities along with storage solutions:


just how much of the cloud computing market that Amazon owns and how much of an effect it has when it goes down. You really have just a couple battling it out for the market share. According to a 2017 study by the Synergy Research Group, AWS market share makes up little over 40% of the cloud computing provider’s space. You then have Microsoft Azure, Google, and IBM competing at around 20%. And of course, there are thousands of other smaller providers all fighting for the rest.
This is a very important reminder of why the web needs more cloud computing providers for storage and delivery. Large companies aren’t even taking advantage of cross-region replication. Healthy competition in this space is always a good thing, as it drives costs down for businesses and consumers, and means a wider distribution of services and solutions across multiple providers.

The three main cloud computing types are:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS)


he first half of 2019, total spend on hardware and software used to build cloud infrastructure was almost $55 billion – somewhat evenly split between public and private clouds. Infrastructure investments by cloud service providers helped them to generate over $90 billion in revenues from cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, hosted private cloud services) and enterprise SaaS, in addition to which their infrastructure supports internet services such as search, social networking, email, e-commerce, gaming and mobile apps. Those cloud providers need somewhere to house their infrastructure, so spending on data center leasing and colocation services continue to grow strongly. Meanwhile UCaaS, while in many ways a different type of market, is also growing strongly and is driving some radical changes in business communications.

“Cloud-associated markets are growing at rates ranging from 10% to well over 40% and annual spending on cloud will double in under four years. Cloud is increasingly dominating the IT landscape,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “Cloud has opened up a range of opportunities for new market entrants and for disruptive technologies and business models. Amazon and Microsoft have led the charge in terms of driving changes and aggressively growing cloud revenue streams, but many other tech companies are also benefitting. The flip side is that some traditional IT players are having a hard time balancing protection of legacy businesses with the need to fully embrace cloud."



New data from Synergy Research Group shows that across seven key cloud service and infrastructure market segments, operator and vendor revenues for the first half of 2019 passed the $150 billion milestone, having grown by 24% from the first half of 2018. In the cloud service segments, IaaS & PaaS had the highest growth rate at 44%, followed by enterprise SaaS at 27%, UCaaS at 23% and hosted private cloud infrastructure services at 20%. Spending on hardware and software for public, private and hybrid infrastructure grew at just over 10%, while cloud provider spending on colocation and data center leasing grew by 17%. In aggregate, spending on cloud services is now far greater than spending on supporting data center infrastructure. Across the whole cloud ecosystem, companies that featured the most prominently among the first half market segment leaders were Microsoft, Amazon/AWS, Dell EMC, Cisco, HPE and Google. Other major players included Salesforce, Adobe, VMware, IBM, Digital Realty, Equinix and Rackspace. In aggregate these companies accounted for well over half of all cloud-related revenues.

Considering not only Activision’s vast cache of proprietary gaming intellectual property but also the nearly 400 million monthly active players, many of whom already are spending money in virtual world

Half-Yearly Review Shows $150 billion Spent on Cloud Services and Infrastructure

Ownership of the virtual gaming future

In the interim, the fate of current Activision CEO Bobby K


the metaverse materializes, it will be predominately populated by Gen Z and subsequent generations, who will have exclusively grown up in the digital world, especially gaming. According to a recent study of Gen Z gamers by Razorfish and Vice Media Group, they spend twice as much time hanging out with friends in the metaverse than they do in real life. More than half said they would like to experience making money in the metaverse; 33% would like to experience building a career there; and 20% of their entertainment/leisure budgets will be earmarked for in-game purchases over the next five years.