May 10, 2024
Today at
10:32
Microsoft plans to launch its own online store for mobile games and accessories in July. It would become a competitor for the stores of Apple and Google.
The new store will be accessible via the web browser. Initially, Microsoft wants to offer its own games there, but later titles from other publishers will also be sold. Gamers will also be able to get discounts on in-game purchases of popular titles such as ‘Candy Crush Saga’.
Sarah Bond, the CEO of Microsoft’s gaming platform Xbox, announced the plans on Thursday at a tech conference of the news and information agency Bloomberg.
Sarah Bond announces plans for a Microsoft games store
Bond explains that choosing your own online store, instead of an app, means that it is ‘accessible on all devices and in all countries, independent of the rules of closed ecosystem stores’. The latter is a reference to the app stores of Apple and Google, which charge 30 percent costs and impose all kinds of rules on other parties who want to sell their apps there.
Because gamers are not tied to one ecosystem, they will also be able to ‘take their account, their games and rewards’ across different devices, such as smartphones and game consoles, Bond said. Microsoft’s own top game ‘Minecraft’ may be one of the first games to appear in the online store.
Duopoly
Microsoft lagged behind in the mobile games market for a long time, but recently made a major breakthrough in the gaming market with the purchase of top developer Activision Blizzard. That company’s portfolio includes the extremely popular ‘Candy Crush’, which has been downloaded 5 billion times and raised $20 billion since its launch in 2012.
Microsoft’s plans are part of a broader resistance from game developers against the dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores. Game builder Epic Games in particular has been waging a legal battle for years to break the power of the duopoly.
