These acquisitions are ridiculous. How long till Disney buys Microsoft? Why even bother having more than one company in the US?
Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#362The 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.
Stephen Totilo shared this back in June of last year. Apparently Bobby's got an agreement signed that if he gets terminated he makes $292 million off of it, double what he made last year. So that might be part of it. https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1407658278893592579
How long is that valid for? Also does buyout by Microsoft count as a “change of control” … I’d bet Microsoft would wait out whatever time span that’s valid for and then immediately refuse to give him another one and can him…
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
I share your dismay. Even if you're someone who doesn't care about the issues that have come to light over the past year, the blatant mismanagement (dare I say running into the ground) of the once golden Blizzard portfolio has been painful as a long-time Starcraft 2 fan. For a moment, I was truly hopeful that we might see some reinvigoration for blundered projects like the Warcraft III reforged. Perhaps even some hop…
Everything under Blizzard's portfolio feels like it has been left to rot. The only thing they seem to put effort into is their Pay-To-Win card game, Hearthstone. Unfortunately even under new management I don't see Starcraft getting much love, the focus is now on cross-platform games and RTS games are PC only (which is a small niche compared to the overall market).
Yep. Overwatch is an empty husk of a game and community it once was.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...] 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 bigg…
400 - 1400 (Feudal economics) 1850 - 1920 (Railroad + oil/steel trusts) 1880 - 1982 (ATT) 1950 - 1975 (IBM) 1985 - 2000 (Intel/Microsoft) 2008 - current (Google/Apple/Amazon) 2014 - current (Meta) It's the nature of technology to produce consolidation, before the next breakthrough occurs and incumbents are typically swept away. On the plus side, the length of dominant periods seems to be decreasing. And realistically…
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Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#365It's wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming. They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they're missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway. That's a heck of a moat.
They are still missing a mobile platform and that's why I believe they will retry within the next few years
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#366The 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.
Stephen Totilo shared this back in June of last year. Apparently Bobby's got an agreement signed that if he gets terminated he makes $292 million off of it, double what he made last year. So that might be part of it. https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1407658278893592579
Aren’t those types of severance packages typically invalid if you’re fired for good cause (like sexual harassment)?
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#367a lot of comments seem to be concern about the antitrust. Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard just put them in number 3 slot. Tencent and Sony are far bigger in gaming. if Apple lawsuit didn't take down Apple store just forced Apple to allows third party payment option. i don't think Microsoft will get slap with a antitrust. Microsoft isn't even number 1 in gaming.
Tencent doesn't have one of the major consoles nor the vast majority of desktop operating system installations. If someone was going to encourage the government to stop the merger I'd expect them to try defining the market along terms different from just "size of gaming revenues". They'd target more the synergies that could be used to anticompetitive advantage and limit customer choice.
Not to say that will happen. Just that if it does, it wouldn't be on dollar size in game sales alone.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
This can't be permanent. I bet this is to keep the markets happy in the short term while this gets absorbed, and then Kotick will "retire" at some point in the next year.
I'd buy shares right now if they had gotten rid of Kotick.
Even though it would cost an additional $275 ish million?
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think for gaming this is pretty negative that everything is consolidated under large developers. I also don't think that the atmosphere under Microsoft will be better than under Activision. I hope PC gaming can detach from Microsoft as soon as possible to be honest.
I would think women employees would be harassed less under Microsoft
It seems very likely, based on comments Phil Spencer made just 3 months ago, when the acquisition was likely already on the table.
https://www.engadget.com/xbox-phil-spencer-activision-blizza...
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#370Congratulations 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…
Microsoft owns CoD, Doom, Quake, Minecraft, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and soon Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch. They're becoming the Disney of gaming, which is scary, but hey, Microsoft gonna Microsoft.
Hopefully they can start to force Sony into a world where cross console play is a thing if they have enough of the marquee franchises.