They are long overdue for a break-up. I guess the US elite thinks otherwise.
If you want them to break up you'd first need to get the law changed. There are larger game companies still.
Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#132The most important question I have is: will they replace Bobby Kotick? EDIT: "Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard. [...] he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture." Shame on you, Microsoft.
Activision's value skyrocketed under Kotick, not sure why they would want to replace him.
Value skyrocketed, but IP was demolished. Warcraft and Starcraft are two of the most popular game franchises ever. Today, nobody cares about the story of these games anymore. Popular characters have been written into a wall or killed off in an unsatisfying way. The overall story is a tangled mess of retcons, 1000 IQ BBEG, and directionless plot lines. While Activision made record profits, they did it at the cost of player numbers. Every new character is shallow, uninspired, quickly killed off, or never used again after their initial use(Bwonsamdi, Rexar, many more). By failing to appease players with the story, and putting systems designers in charge of gameplay, they have been draining the value of their IP for the last 10 years.
For games to be successful today, they need popularity. Twitch streamers need to play it. Youtubers need to make "how-tos", and word of mouth is king. Activision drove the final nail in their coffin with the PR nightmare this year. No amount of necromancy (Warcraft Reforged, Classic WoW, Diablo 2) can save the company long term.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#133Can't wait for cloud gaming.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#134The most important question I have is: will they replace Bobby Kotick? EDIT: "Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard. [...] he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture." Shame on you, Microsoft.
Honestly, this is the sort of thing they have to say right now - the deal isn't closed yet, and saying they're going to dump him might lead to shareholder lawsuits, especially if the acquisition is blocked.
Realistically, there's a high chance that within a few months of the acquisition being completed he'll be expected to leave quietly.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#135With these kind of acquisitions, other companies are going to find it very hard to compete with Game Pass. I think we'll look back in 10 years and wonder why antitrust regulators did nothing, but it may be too late by then.
I looked around for a while, a d I can't actually find a list of any mergers that antitrust regulations actually prevented. I'm assuming some survivor bias is involved here and we don't hear about the ones that stopped early, but it seems that what I and most folks assume antitrust regulations do is different than what actually happens. I remember the Sirius/XM merge and how those were the only two players in the mar…
Nvidia/Arm comes to mind as a recent acquisition prevented.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#136This makes me even more glad I quit Blizzard Games long ago.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Is this a reference to something specific?
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#138These acquisitions are ridiculous. How long till Disney buys Microsoft? Why even bother having more than one company in the US?
Microsoft is 10x the size of Disney, so more likely they buy Disney than the other way around.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#139The more I think about this - the more I hope that Microsoft does another starcraft and gets it in the works. That way my young children will get to play starcraft in their teens (10 year dev cycle imho). That would be a small win for me :)
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#140Congratulations to Phil Spencer, who started out leading an upstart team at Microsoft for a new game console called "Xbox" and is now "CEO of Microsoft Gaming" - a Microsoft Senior Leadership position. Oh, and he now leads the third biggest gaming company on the planet: > When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony. It will be interes…
> [...] if Satya and the Board spin off gaming into an independent company at some point.
I certainly think this should happen.
The trillion dollar giants should not span multiple industries. They have absurd monopoly power and can make growing your own niche impossible.
Why does a cloud computing / operating system vendor / hardware manufacturer / business software / developer tooling company also own the third biggest gaming outfit?
Why, for that matter, are Amazon and Apple also movie studios (and soon to be game studios)?
This is ridiculous. These companies never have to compete with you. It's easy for them to funnel money into any effort and clone your product. You can struggle to grow revenue and they can simply allocate an engineering team and marketing budget.
You'll probably also have to buy your competitor's products or pay their taxes at some point.