Take Two just bought Zynga recently for 12 billion and it was the biggest dev purchase of all time. MS just bought Activision/Blizzard for HOW MUCH?? WOW.
I think MS did this to pad their own subscription service first and foremost, but I’m sure they’re also well aware that Sony is coming with their own sub service and I think this could’ve easily been a preemptive launch against it, not as an act of “war” or anything that dramatic, but an effort to help their own service while hurting the competition out of the gate.
We’ll see, and I know Sony isn’t quite as flush with cash as MS is, but we could very well be seeing the start of an arms race between two gaming giants as they both go big game hunting for the best groups of games for their services.
I could easily see Sony announcing both a few partnerships as well as a big purchase of their own then their own service launches. I could see them coming to a deal with Ubisoft on some sort of PS Pass (or whatever it’ll be called) exclusivity for a period of time and then purchasing either a Square Enix or a Capcom.
My prediction: By the end of 2022, Sony will own two of Square Enix, Capcom, Bandai-Namco or Sega and MS will own one of WB Games or EA.
What do you think? Any other purchases you see on the horizon? Think “begun the subscription wars have” or is this just MS padding their own lineup and nothing else will follow for a while? Curious to hear anyone’s thoughts.
I’d have to disagree with some of your predictions. I know MS is throwing a lot of money around to acquire various big companies, but MS is more than a gaming company, and with their outside ventures beyond gaming, they have the ability to throw around that kind of money. Sony has as of lately been doing poorly in their gaming division, at least according to some of the sources I listen to on the gaming front. I doubt they have the kind of acquisition cash MS can throw around and realistically, some of the companies you mention, while they would fit under a Sony brand, I think they more or less need the greater open platform market to survive.
Sony’s movie market is doing much better, but it’s also not making the ridiculous money it would want to like pre-pandemic Marvel.
At most, I could see Square and Capcom coming under their name, but Bandai Namco makes more than video games, and they honestly have the capital to get into the console wars themselves if they wanted, so I see NO chance of that happening at all. Maybe Sega now that I think about it.
However, I think MS is taking some strategic steps to position themselves better for the long haul, and in part of that, I think at some point, MS will seek shares in overseas markets. Sony closed their own in house game development division in Japan either last year or the year before, and I have no doubt MS would like the market share Sony is neglecting with other Japanese devs. So MS may try to beat them to it, and we may see some surprising purchases yet still.
Well, last year’s gaming revenue was about 18 billion to MS’ 10 billion. I know they’re not as big as MS, but they could absolutely fit a Capcom under their umbrella. Square Enix would be a little tougher, but not impossible by any stretch. I agree Bandai-Namco would be exceedingly unlikely.
There’s honestly a greater chance that they aim for strategic partnerships. I mean, they likely don’t even need to purchase Square Enix given the fact that they essentially have exclusivity with Final Fantasy right now. Sure, MS gets other franchises like the Marvel stuff along with Sony, but if Sony is putting out a GamePass clone as most suspect, I could see Sony doing several deals the way they did for Street Fighter V or even on a smaller scale, simply purchasing timed exclusivity for individual games.
I’d say Sega is less likely than a Capcom level company simply based on revenue. I believe size-wise, Sega is about 3 times bigger, plus Sega has some parts of their business that have been failing for years, such as their arcades and what not. I feel like a Sega purchase would be a bit more complicated as the very least.
Honestly, in terms of sheer depth of classic library, depth of IPs and variety of IPs, Sega makes a TON of sense for Microsoft.
Imagine putting tons of games from the Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, Sega CD, 32X, Saturn and Dreamcast in your service, and then all of a sudden you’re the owner of several platformers, fighting games, JRPGs and a wide variety of other stuff that you don’t overly have at the moment?
Sony honestly has a lot of those genres covered already for the most part, either by their own first party studios or third party agreements. Sure, if they wanted to lock down those genres the way MS has more or less locked down the shooter genre (minus COD, which I’d assume remains multiplatform), then that could make sense for them.
Either way, I could see Sega being an attractive option for either of them, even if I think MS makes more sense for Sega from a variety and genre depth standpoint.
I also think WB Games makes a ton of sense for MS, assuming they can also bring along the various licenses. Sony having Spider Man has been pretty big for them the last several years. Havind all of DC and specifically the Batman related stuff would be a pretty big match for MS. Not to mention having the best fighting game studio outside of Japan in Netherealm in case they want both Mortal Kombat at a Killer Instinct dev.
This purchase is huge, but I have to question the wisdom behind it. Blizzard has been doing quite badly reputation-wise for the past few years, with a lot of poor wishy-washy direction on their live games and a stagnant state concerning any new releases. I expect them to really start hurting this decade if nothing changes.
And on the Activision side there’s little else besides five kinds of Call of Duty, though that is at least a torrential money-waterfall with no signs of slowing down. MS could step in to make things better, but as of right now this acquisition isn’t terribly exciting in my book.
Yeah no offense, but this kind of aggressive market buyout is sounding like a monopolistic nightmare. I have a lot of doubts that a Japanese company that actually wants to sell in Japan would even entertain the idea of allowing Xbox to buy them, as well.
There is one other thing made aware to me about this story. David Doel (The Rational National), made mention this acquisition is still around 18 months out, and still has to pass through the Justice Department’s gaze and survive anti-monopoly scrutiny before the acquisition is approved and the sale can commence. However, given the atmosphere of certain things I won’t go into detail on these forums about, it still seems very likely this acquisition will go on as planned.
And he did make the point of how this does present a very bad monopolistic vision, to which there’s not honestly much we as gamers could really do anything about. I do hope they kick Bobby Kotick out of Activision though, as part of their management shakeup, and while not explicitly stated it could or would happen, there’s a strong chance it might.
I dont think it’s necessarily at the point where it’s very concerning, though it’s probably knocking on the threshold. Activision-Blizzard is a huge catch, no doubt, but there’s still plenty of other big software companies in the pond. I don’t expect Xbox’s expansion to go much further, if only because this kind of scrutiny exists.
The biggest thing they get out of this is Call of Duty, a multi-billion franchise that is inarguably a massive cornerstone for gaming with loads of casual and genre appeal. Decisions about its exclusivity will likely draw even more of those audiences to the Xbox platform, giving Game Pass a big boost I imagine, and generally everything a big springboard to grow from. Though at the same time, we can still expect it to be on PC and, at least for a while, probably other services like Steam. Same goes for Blizzard’s games.
Speculation on how this will impact Xbox’s long-term growth aside, I’m still much more interested to see how their smaller studios will work out. What I really want to see from all this is diverse IPs and good games.
Actvision-Blizzard is a company in decline. I don’t think there’s any way of getting around that. From their toxic workplace culture to the decline of their IPs.
WOW’s player count has declined each year since Blizzard merged with Activision. Starcraft has all but disappeared. Meanwhile on the Activision side, they have several legacy IPs (Spyro, Vigilante 8, Pitfall, Blur, Gun, Singularity, Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, etc) that either haven’t seen the light of day in years or worse. Also, several of their creative teams have been dragooned in to being support for annual COD games which, in spite of selling like crazy, have still created franchise fatigue with sales numbers that have been decreasing every year.
All of this is why Activision-Blizzard was available in the first place. If they were a healthy, thriving company with no scandals whatsoever, there’s no logical reason why MS and A-B even begin talking about a sale.
But their stock price has been falling and both their executive leadership team and their board almost assuredly want out. Of course, they’re not just going to leave paying gigs. This allows them all some nice golden parachutes to leave a company that they’ve been bleeding dry for years.
So why purchase this publisher? Well, for one thing, you get one of the biggest third party franchises in all of gaming in COD. That’s obvious. But also, according to some experts yesterday, MS has been looking to make inroads in multiple areas, most notably PC, mobile and to a lesser extent esports. This deal accomplishes all of those things while adding several studios. This is a fit that makes sense for both sides.
I think I probably jumped the gun a little yesterday on this lol. My bad. Sony might answer or they might not. They really don’t need to. If they want to fatten up their new service, they can easily rely on strategic partnerships and maybe a studio purchase here and there. They don’t have to go out and buy Square Enix or Capcom. Sony’s been so great a strategic partnerships, they’ve all but kept MS out of the Japanese market entirely, so why would they need to change tact and spend all their cash on hand now?
On the MS side, I do think we’ll see another studio purchase or two this year. Maybe they purchase Crystal Dynamics from Square Enix or maybe they bring IO Interactive in to the fold. But actual publishers? I dunno. They have 32 studios now. Adding another publisher that has several studios of their own feels a bit unnecessary, unless they’re looking to fill specific voids, such as games more suited to the Japanese market or certain genres they’d like to address for GamePass. We’ll see.
I don’t think any of these types of purchases would result in a monopoly for either Sony or MS though. That word was thrown around a lot yesterday and it’s simply not possible. MS’ Activision purchase bumps them from 4th to 3rd in publisher revenue. No one’s calling antitrust lawyers over a company going from 4th to 3rd. Now if MS purchased Tencent? Okay, that would be questionable. But even then, it doesn’t eliminate Sony or Nintendo’s ability to compete in the console space and it doesn’t eliminate the multitude of publishers and devs out there.
A few things here. One, I sincerely doubt MS announces this purchase if they thought for a second it would fail but also, I think people need to reexamine what an actual “monopoly” is. By defintion, it’s “the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.” There’s simply no logical way a company going from 4th in revenue in this industry to 3rd could ever fall anywhere close to “exclusive possession or control.” MS wouldn’t be the only console developer and certainly not the only publisher, they wouldn’t have the highest revenue even.
Oh yeah, agree 100%. Seems he’s likely getting shown the door though once the transition is complete. I’m sure he’ll get a golden parachute too, which sucks. He and all the ghouls on their board deserve far worse, but at least they’ll hopefully all be gone.
Yeah, I agree. I think they’ll say they’re not going to stop and I could see a few studio purchases here and there to help shore up some holes in Game Pass’ library and on their roster of IPs, especially if they’re deals that make strategic, financial sense for the devs, but the idea that MS is just going to keep devouring publishers at tens of billions a clip is far-fetched at best. Guess we’ll see though.
Listened to Xbox Two last night and one of the hosts made a good point about COD and how exclusivity could conceivably work. It’d make sense to keep Warzone multiplatform given how much it generates in MTs, but either the 2023 COD or 2024 COD could go exclusive. That way they can still say that COD is on PS, but if you want to play each new game, you need something that has Game Pass. To me that makes sense. You don’t spend 70 billion dollars to just maintain the status quo IP-wise.
I do kinda wonder though if COD is the biggest thing they got yesterday. I mean, WOW is still huge and it’s arguably MS’ answer to Final Fantasy XIV’s exclusivity to Playstation. They also got battle.net, Major League Gaming, King, who’s mobile games basically print money… COD is the biggest franchise, I’d certainly agree, but I think the whole package is exactly what they were looking for on multiple fronts.
Depends a little, I think. I don’t care for COD or Activision’s laser-focus on it, but what anyone thinks about it doesn’t seem to matter at this point. It comes out every year and gives most people exactly what they want. And it always sells massively.
I can’t say the same for Blizzard’s IPs, and it seems like a lot of bad trends from the past decade are beginning to really catch up to them. Bad launches, slow and indecisive development, live direction that seems to care more about chasing trends and listening to executives instead of players, etc. I can only hope some fresh managment will help everything.
Yeah, it could go a little further without being too much. I just don’t want to see Xbox turn into this all-consuming empire for third-party developers before we even see any payoff for what they have now.
Japanese developers are practically untouchable by MS at this point in time, not just because of Sony. As far as the console industry, being bound to Xbox exclusivity is still pretty much a death sentence there, and it’s critical to be on either Playstation or Nintendo. That’s just how it is there and it will take a long time to change.
Yeah, but again everything that isn’t COD feels like a pretty big gamble at this point. I just hope MS or anyone has a real plan to address the problems with these studios. I can’t remember where, but several years ago I heard some stories about how MS had to crack the corporate whip a few times at Bungie to get them to make decisions and release shippable games. Maybe we’ll have to see something similar here.
I don’t particularly care about COD either. I barely play FPS to be honest. But COD, as a brand, is seeing their sales numbers decline, either due to lack of quality and innovation the franchise was previously known for or perhaps IP fatigue is finally kicking in.
Yeah, I agree with all of this as well.
I mean, if MS is cutting the checks and their games sell in the US, then I’m not sure how much it matters that their games don’t sell well in Japan. Of course, if they’re known, quality IPs that Japan already likes, it might finally help Xbox make some inroads there. But it can’t just be one title or one franchise. If MS were to buy a studio or a publisher, they’d have to have a solid stable of popular IPs.
In that regard, I think Capcom would be a great get for MS. Monster Hunter is wildly popular in Japan, there’s still a good fighting game scene over there, and they like Resident Evil. Add in some other franchises like Dead Rising, Lost Planet, Mega Man, Ace Attorney, Breath of Fire, Ghosts N Goblins, Onimusha, Devil May Cry, Dino Crisis, Bionic Commando and Viewtiful Joe… That’s a LOT of franchises that would help MS in that market.
Of course, MS buying a company as big as Capcom would be subject to Japan’s government scrutiny, which would be exceedingly heavy given their laws.
Yeah absolutely. The culture change is definitely going to be an ongoing thing and I’ll be really curious to see how that plays out. I mean, Activision/Blizzard has so many problems right now, from horrendous crunch, layoffs/rehires to make earnings look better and a myriad of sexual misconduct issues, allegations and lawsuits on the employee side to a substantial MT approach and rushed products to meet quarterly earnings and what not on the games side.
I mean, how do you fix that once you actually own them? Do you simply go through the process of weeding out the bad actors naturally or do you take a more proactive approach to protect employees and launch investigations and what not? Hopefully the process-side resolves itself quickly and the crunch and layoff/rehiring practices go away quickly. That might be a nice first step. We’ll see.
Maybe I’m missing something, but Black Ops: Cold War sold very well, didn’t it? And while Vanguard lagged behind a bit, it was still the best-selling game of the year so there may be factors not specific to it (including the huge popularity of Warzone). I wouldn’t call that a terribly concerning sign, at least not yet. Plus there was news recently that COD is considering dropping the annual release routine.
It’s hard to stress enough how much of an uphill battle Xbox has in Japan, from decades of market history and locally-rooted platform loyalty. Even the embrace of PC gaming is relatively recent over there. There might be a few encouraging signs for Xbox in the long-term, but it’s going to take many years to get enough of a foothold to convince anyone to accept the idea of being acquired by Microsoft, cutting off Playstation and especially Nintendo. They’d have to start with temporary partnerships, I think, and they’d have to succeed.
Like @Iago407 said, I think they mean they’ll keep Warzone on everything and rake in the money there, but otherwise new standalone titles will be exclusive to Xbox and PC (and Game Pass). I suspect they’ll tie in some smaller incentives for Warzone, as well.
This clears things up. Reportedly the next three planned annual COD games will be on Playstation, and there’s apparently rumors of a Warzone 2 that doesn’t seem to factor in. After 2024, who knows?