Here's what I think about Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard - Part 2

 Subs per month just because Phil Spence is in charge, and then there's Overwatch. I mean I just don't even know to be honest how much Blizzard botched this franchise is amazing and I still haven't seen anything that suggests the sequel is a real sequel with a very expensive esports league which really pays and pays and continues to pay if it's worth outside of current studios and ips phil spencer has already been public i'm pondering the revival of classic ips like tony hawk and spyro and crash band acute and guitar hero hell even hexson was mentioned by phil. i would love it if that were the case it would be great to see these classic games return to regular rotation i love all these franchises but the shareholders don't because they don't make money, a lesson activision learned themselves as they tried to revive her, only to then abandon her and get those studios back on-demand Shareholder Compulsory Content I'm assuming King Makers of Candy Crush and dozens of other games are basically like Candy Crush as the crown jewel of that purchase feel To be honest, it's a bunch of studios just making money, and they're doing it in mobile, where development costs are a fraction of what AAA games cost, and it scales infinitely. I mean, we get excited when a game sells 5 million units. Candy Crush has 2.7 billion downloads, so yeah, I expect shareholders will be more interested in what King is producing compared to what toys for Bob are working on when I saw the Bethesda deal, I am alright, $7 billion, good IP functional studios that Microsoft is about to absorb

All of this integrates into their ecosystem and becomes an immediate added value. It instantly strengthens your IP library. Your talent pool for development. Your exclusive lineup. The Game Pass value proposition. It's kind of plug and play Will they make the money back, no part of it is plug and play, to get this new company to recover its purchase price, it will require a radical transformation of Activision Blizzard and Microsoft. I don't know what that looks like, I really don't know. It's not as easy as getting more exclusive content on Game Pass because I think this purchase will change the entire way Microsoft sees the gaming landscape and their role in it, the console war that these brainless, low-iq people are overthinking Arguing on Twitter, this is a whole new era right here

Making agreements and continuing to ensure that Activision games are cross-platform. End Quote That's some pretty blunt language, as Microsoft has absolutely no obligation to keep Activision games cross-platform unless existing contracts state that people are wondering how all this would end up, which Phil Spencer himself took to twitter to to take on the temporary cloak of the pony whisperer. quote had good conversations with executives at sony this week. I confirmed our intention to honor all existing agreements post activision blizzard acquisition and our desire to maintain call of duty on playstation sony an important part of our industry and we value our relationship. end quote i wasn't surprised that we said earlier about the bethesda deal that you don't spend $7 billion and make the content exclusive to the activision blizzard deal, i say you don't spend $70 billion and do yours Content then exclusive to certain plastic boxes, that's a whole different equation, he If you're talking about a cash issue that requires huge growth to generate a return, Microsoft is going to jump into every possible growth vector, and Playstation is a huge growth opportunity for them . I mean the ps4 has sold 120 million units to date the ps5 will probably do the same or more over its life cycle when people can start getting their hands on an xbox long gone from console sales they haven't had money with it consoles deserve they care about the ecosystem and if they can use their big smack IP as a trojan horse to trick you into creating a microsoft account while playing one of their games on a playstation then they will do. I mean, what if overwatch 2 on playstation 5 comes with three free months of game pass on your pc booted up to xcloud on your buddy's old xbox that he no longer uses

Boom, you're in the baby Xbox, you're far-fetched at this point, and curlers won't let you go. Many people suspect that this deal will result in more exclusive Xbox content. I kinda see it differently as Microsoft's appetite for growth is now so great that cutting off the entire Playstation gamer segment is just a bad idea, and while I don't expect every Microsoft game to end up on the Playstation, do expect I definitely think to more than a few of them this means Sony is doomed if you ask the stock market, perhaps the day after the announcement that Sony stock had plummeted and the company lost about $20 billion in market value. I may not be very smart but I know that's stupid because Sonya will be fine I think it's important to remember what I said before. One of the hallmarks of Phil Spencer's leadership is his willingness to get up and run

it's probably not a real thing i think it's just a meme point is between their exclusives project spartacus they're pushing to mobile they're versioning tv and movie stuff and tons more sony have a lot of growth vectors that they themselves are going to be able to tap and they are going to be just fine the rumors of their impending doom are greatly exaggerated but that's not to say that they aren't going to be rushing to get their hands on as many studios as their creditors will allow because microsoft's moby dick sized acquisition cannot go unanswered so a few times in this video i've said that i think this deal kind of sucks i've listed some reasons why but here's the big one i think we should all be worried about industry consolidation and no deal in the history of video games has consolidated more of this industry than this deal long have we discussed the expansion of tencent across some of the largest and most profitable publishers and developers hell they own riot games and digital extremes and they own part of supercell and epic games plus a whole bunch more on top of that sony have been on a massive buying spree for years now with notable acquisitions like blue point insomniac and house mark in just the last few years alone you might not have heard of embracer group but they're buying up pretty much every double a western developer they can get their hands on including most recently gearbox makers of borderlands there's dozens and dozens of acquisitions that fall outside this list as well and it all points to an inevitable endpoint of just a handful of corporations owning all the best ips and all the best studios the same way that disney now owns pretty much everything that can be good sometimes i mean look at the mcu we all love that right except for those autumn film director guys then there's star wars which is [ __ ] now like it's just [ __ ] they [ __ ] it okay they really did then again it's not like the prequel trilogy

That was all great, and that was all, George Point. You can't necessarily draw a straight line between something that's owned by a great company and the same thing that's bad. I know one thing, although I know that megacorporations exist in large quantities, part to prevent other things from existing, they occupy outsize positions in the market. They are taste makers in the crudest and most vulgar sense of the word. When something outside of their possession begins to flourish, they either quickly destroy it or assimilate into their great hive. I worry when I imagine a video game industry ruled by these titanic golems because I don't think we as consumers get better video games in this future. I think it breaks Star Wars more than an MCU, but maybe I'm just being a cynical, as concerned as I am about this, I also believe that video games are far more resilient to this centralization than many other forms of entertainment. i mean, valheim was the work of five people death store was the work of two people plus support staff stardew valley was a guy, with five people or less you can't make a movie or tv show possible here in the world of video games, and that will never cease to be possible. I think it's going to get harder as these companies swallow more and more and consolidate their storefronts and learn how to block out any noise they don't want their customers to hear, but I think good video games will always find a way , to be made and then found by humans. even with this optimism i can't help but be pessimistic about the long-term implications of this trend, sony and microsoft both function as benevolent overlords empowering their studios to deliver great games right now, but fundamentally i don't

believe companies are built to do good, not built to make money, and in the coming content war when there are no publishers or studios or IP to buy and there are no consumers, can they care about them because they already have them all, then the only growth vector available is to charge us more for less or more for nothing, as in the case of nfts, which by the way are the basis of the metaverse, the microsoft specifically mentioned when buying Activision Blizzard So if you don't think Microsoft will eventually jump on the NFT bandwagon, you're in for a very rude awakening. I'm glad this deal went through because I truly believe that Phil Spencer and Microsoft are sufficiently motivated to fix Activision Blizzard's problems, and I think they will. I'm glad this still happened because I think Activision Blizzard staff will be better off in the end, but I think this deal is kinda successful ks because I wish there was another way. i wish bobby kottig didn't get away scot free and get $670 million richer acquisition cost i don't know that this will necessarily result in better results for these studios. I wish Bobby Coddick and his ilk could have been removed without the industry increasingly consolidating in the hands of a few big corporations accelerating an arms race that can end up being just a handful of corporations and billionaires who own all the studios and IPs own the ones we love. I just wish a deal like this wasn't necessary, but it feels like it's necessary right now, so we'll just have to see how you do