It's a mega takeover: The software company Microsoft announced on Tuesday the purchase of the video game manufacturer Activision Blizzard.

He wants to pay almost $69 billion in cash for it.

This is by far the most expensive acquisition in the company's history.

The largest acquisition so far was the career network LinkedIn, for which Microsoft paid more than $26 billion in 2016.

Just last year, the group announced the $16 billion acquisition of Nuance, a specialist in speech recognition technology.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

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Activision Blizzard is one of the largest video game manufacturers in the world and is known for titles like "Call of Duty" or "World of Warcraft".

Microsoft said Tuesday the acquisition would make the company number three in the entire global video games industry, behind China's Tencent and Japan's Sony.

In the video game business, Microsoft is best known for its Xbox console, which competes with Sony's PlayStation. The group also develops its own games, one of the most popular titles is "Halo". It has also acquired a number of competitors to strengthen its offering. Just under a year ago, he completed the $7.5 billion acquisition of Bethesda Softworks, the maker of titles like Doom and The Elder Scrolls. In 2014, he paid $2.5 billion for the maker of the popular game Minecraft.

Beyond its hardware and the sale of individual titles, Microsoft has increasingly focused on offering its games in a subscription service comparable to Netflix in recent years. As stated in the message on Tuesday, this "Game Pass" now has more than 25 million paying customers.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday, "Video games are today's most dynamic and exciting entertainment category across all platforms." He added that video games will play a "key role" in the development of platforms in the so-called metaverse. In doing so, he put the takeover in the context of one of the major current trends in the technology industry. Companies like the social network Facebook, recently renamed Meta Platforms, describe the Metaverse as the next generation of the Internet and see video games as a central application. Video game manufacturers such as Epic Games or Roblox are also pursuing strategies related to the metaverse. The term refers to a virtual world in which users become part of the Internet, so to speak.

With the takeover of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is underlining that it wants to continue to get involved in consumer markets.

Under Nadella, the group has focused primarily on business software in recent years and has grown rapidly, especially in the business with offers related to "cloud computing".

In addition to its acquisitions in the video game market, Microsoft was also interested in buying the TikTok smartphone app.