Microsoft recently announced that it has proposed to buy Activision Blizzard in a deal valued at nearly $70 billion, but it seems that several other companies, including EA, were interested in a deal with the Call Of Duty publisher as well.

In a new Venture Beat interview with Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, it was discussed why the publisher decided to agree on a deal with the Xbox company, with Kotick saying that he was looking over the course of the next couple of years and decided that Activision Blizzard would, “need thousands of people to be able to execute against our production plans.” He also explained that he had conversations with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and Phil Spencer, head of gaming at Microsoft, “over many, many years of bigger things that we could do together.”