Microsoft is spending a pretty penny to buy gaming behemoth Activision Blizzard, and if it gets approval from the feds, it plans to share a little with the competition.

The company announced in February that it signed a 10-year binding agreement to bring the best-selling Call of Duty series to Nintendo for the first time in nearly a decade—if the merger with Activision Blizzard is approved.

The gaming industry has been dominated by console sales and first-party, exclusively licensed, or in-house developed games for decades, but Microsoft’s recent deal seeks to upend some of the industry’s conventional wisdom.

• Instead of limiting access to its games, Microsoft appears to be accelerating a licensing-first strategy—while fully embracing the cloud through its Game Pass subscription service—enabling non-Xbox gamers to play on phones, PCs, and TVs.

“As long as they’re the company that’s delivering the service, facilitating a service from some other development studio, or it’s a first-party studio coupled with Xbox services, they’re happy either way, because they’re making money off both those slices of the pie,” Lewis Ward, research director of gaming, esports and VR/AR at IDC, told Tech Brew.

The $68.7 billion proposed acquisition, which Microsoft first announced in January 2022, would be the company’s largest-ever acquisition and mean a colossal reordering of the gaming industry.

Keep reading here.—JM

Imagine if a machine could design, cut, and create several garments in minutes with limited human intervention. Sounds like a reality we may not see for some time, but if you’ve been paying attention, it’s already happening.

Automation and AI have transformed several industries, and now the robots are coming for fashion.

Take the German fashion marketplace Zalando, for instance, which spearheaded AI-powered fashion design based on customers’ favorite colors, textures, and other style preferences in collaboration with Google. Or Synflux, which, in 2019, collaborated on a project called Algorithmic Couture that uses machine learning to create optimal fashion pattern modules using computer-aided design tools.

Keep reading here.—JS

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

We are using technology to solve one of the most obvious problems in climate, which is that we must invest in sustainable infrastructure like wind, solar, and other clean energy technologies in order to meet net-zero goals, but the process today is archaic and time-consuming, resulting in a backlog of projects that need to be funded. Banyan accelerates the deployment of capital into sustainable infrastructure through purpose-built software that unlocks enormous efficiency in the project finance process, allowing investors and managers to do many more projects.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

I’m keen on cultivated-meat replacements. The bluefin tuna, I’m ashamed to admit, is one of my favorite fish to eat, and it’s endangered, or at least at risk. I think there is tremendous opportunity for these alternative and replacement technologies, and it’s especially interesting merging the climate and planet impact potential. I’m the least optimistic about colonizing off-planet and space tech. I want to focus my efforts on making our beautiful planet habitable today and for our future generations.

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

This one is great! It’s called the Climate Finance Tracker, and it maps the investment in climate based on sectors. I also read a lot of TechCrunch and VentureBeat, and I read Wired (and they even have great articles on climate and technology impacts toward climate recently), and I’ve always been a fan of PCMag.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

Everything! My first manager was Marc Benioff. And no, I didn’t keep up because who knew, right?

What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?

Building a tech startup does consume a lot of my free cycles, but when I’m not thinking about my job, which is the most amazing venture I’ve participated in my career, I have two kids who are 10 and 13. We spend a ton of time just playing, and our favorite things right now are parkour, climbing, hiking, anything that has water in its name or activity, which of course includes surfing every weekend. And in case I forgot, I love food. I think about food a lot.

Stat: Ford was granted 1,342 US patents in 2022, according to NPR.

Quote: “Is it giving you advice that you can’t find on a million other blogs? No.”—Bryan Kuderna, CFP, in an interview with Money Scoop about ChatGPT

Read: A Ukrainian CFO reflects back on a year in business and at war.

Want in on how to keep others out? Join Tech Brew on 3/23 at 12pm ET for a free virtual event, where we’ll dive in with industry expert Alissa “Dr. Jay” Abdullah from Mastercard and consider the biggest cybersecurity challenges in our increasingly digital economy. Register now.

*This editorial content is supported by Vanta.

Catch up on the top Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Inside Delta’s big-dollar, multiyear push to bring free in-flight wi-fi to the masses
• More and more financial institutions are embracing AI
• Roblox’s revenue rose in 2022 despite tech, gaming downturns