Microsoft XO18 roundup: Microsoft acquires game studios inXile and Obsidian, announces 91M+ MAUs for Minecraft, and says Minecraft Marketplace has 77 partners
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second wave of Microsoft's 2018 studio-buying run: five months after [[a:930448|creating The Initiative and acquiring Undead Labs, Playground Games, Ninja Theory, and Compulsion Games]], the company adds RPG specialists inXile and Obsidian at its XO18 event. The through-line is content ownership for Game Pass-era Xbox, executed under Matt Booty, who was promoted from Minecraft boss to corporate VP of Microsoft Studios earlier that year.
Alongside the acquisitions, Microsoft is showing off a second engine: Minecraft at 91M+ monthly active users and a Marketplace with 77 partners, building on an ecosystem it had already begun monetizing via $7M in creator payouts months earlier. The long tail validates both bets — a 2026 profile finds Obsidian shipping three titles in one year while cutting costs under Microsoft ownership.
First-order effects
- Obsidian and inXile move from independent crowdfunding-and-publisher cycles to funded first-party status inside Microsoft Studios, joining the June cohort of acquired studios.
- Minecraft Marketplace's 77 partners get a larger addressable audience as Microsoft reports the game has crossed 91 million monthly active users.
Second-order effects
- Sony and Nintendo face a widening first-party content gap: Microsoft is stockpiling studios across genres (RPG, racing, action) faster than rivals are announcing comparable purchases in this coverage.
- Marketplace economics shift toward platform-operator margins — Microsoft collects on partner content sold into a 91M-MAU install base, the same store-and-revenue-share model it later told the UK CMA it planned to extend to a new Xbox mobile store in its Activision Blizzard acquisition filings.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, console competition consolidates around vertically integrated content portfolios rather than hardware specs — a trajectory that runs from the 2018 studio spree through the eventual Activision Blizzard bid.
- User-generated-content marketplaces like Minecraft's become a template for how platform owners scale content without funding every title themselves, with revenue share replacing acquisition as the cheaper supply mechanism.
The trend: Microsoft is converting Xbox from a hardware business into a content-platform business by buying studios outright while scaling marketplace revenue share on its biggest live game.