On Monday, Microsoft announced one of the largest acquisitions in the company’s history with the purchase of video game developer ZeniMax Media for a reported $7.5 billion. When completed, the acquisition will be the second largest ever in the video game industry, and shows just how serious Microsoft is about the future of their gaming platforms.

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The $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax Media will be the second-largest video game acquisition in history. The largest acquisition prize is currently held by Chinese technology company Tencent, which acquired mobile game company Supercell in 2016 for a reported $8.6 billion. Supercell, the maker of popular mobile games like Clash of Clans, had made billions off of mobile app games before Tencent’s deal. Other large deals include Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR in 2014, Activision Blizzard’s purchase of video game developer King in 2015 and Microsoft’s other large video game acquisition of Mojang in 2014.

Microsoft’s next-generation consoles, the Xbox Series S and Series X, are slated to release in November alongside top competitor Sony’s next-generation PlayStation 5. The releases will kick off the new race for console video game supremacy, and Microsoft’s acquisition looks to make sure their Xbox platform competes on all levels of gaming production and consumption. ZeniMax’s largest money maker is Bethesda, which produces hit video game series like Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Doom. It’s yet to be determined whether Microsoft will push to have these titles exclusive to the Xbox console, but regardless, the acquisition will certainly help boost subscriptions to the company’s recent unveiling of their cloud gaming service Game Pass.

This chart shows a list of the largest video game company acquisitions in history.

Second Generation Consolesthe History Of Video Games Online

Second Generation Consolesthe History Of Video Games On

The addition of an advanced graphics chip, the fourth generation video game home consoles were the start of the 16-bit era. Some major differences between the fourth generation compared to the prior generation are: 16-bit microprocessors, Multi-button game controllers with many buttons (3 to 8), Parallax scrolling of multi-layer tile-map backgrounds, Large sprites, 80–380 sprites on screen,. The Fairchild Channel F marked the start of the second generation of home video game consoles. It was released in North America towards the end of 1976, with a retail price of $169.96. There were two in-built games, and additional games could be purchased in cartridge form. These were known as “Videocarts.”.

Second Generation Consolesthe History Of Video Games To Play

• THE HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES: PART 2 - THE TWO GENERATIONS. This is Part 2 of a mini series I intend to keep creating. To understand how far we have come.yo.
• Many of these consoles and games were low quality, and made it difficult for consoles offering innovative features or quality games to compete. This was one factor which lead to the video game crash of 1983. Digital programmable computers. This generation, many game consoles contained basic 8-bit computers.