166
Microsoft’s $69bn deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard cleared by UK
(www.theguardian.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm torn between wanting Activision to get new management and not wanting Microsoft to aquire two major companies and dominate the market
I am in a similar boat, but i don't think this is THAT big of a deal.
Blizzard is mostly a shell of its former self. FF14 has taken over as the default theme park MMO and Riot own the majority of the sweaty RTS super genre. Also whatever Overwatch counted as.
As for Activision proper? Mostly they've let their IPs languish in favor of CoD. And CoD is still huge, but it is not the industry controlling monster it used to be AND MS are "committed" to keeping that multi-platform (because that is where the money is).
I still think Bethesda/Zenimax was the big "holy shit" acquisition. Obviously Skyrim is one of the biggest games of all time and prints money. But it was mostly all the sub-studios (Machine Games, for example) that very much dominate the "third party" market.
I think King is probably the really big part of this acquisition but... I've never understood the mobile market so I am not even sure if that is still as dominant as I think it is?
Out of all the games you listed, I believe King prints the most $ for Activision.
Oh yeah. King is freaking massive
My point is more that I don't know how much of that is because of how insane the mobile gaming market is versus king still being particularly dominant in that market.
I think it's a bit of both. King is a big name in the market, but mobile gaming is just such a massive revenue stream for companies anyways. IIRC, the mobile market accounts for more money than all other gaming markets combined.
Which I still hold as fucking stupid, why play a shitty mobile game when ya could just emulate the entire SNES games catalogue.
Those aren't the same customer demographics. The overwhelming majority of mobile phone gamers don't know the first thing about emulators. Not to mention, other factors like mobile games being designed to tap into addictive triggers in the brain, social engineering, etc.
I am aware its just incomprehensible for me.