ready player one in 20 years??? any betters
Wonder if this offer was conditional on Activision announcing the laying off of all those accused/guilty of sexual misconduct etc yesterdayā¦ I think MS would have the clout to say, āWeāll make an offer if you get rid of the bad apples firstā¦ā
Iām no expert on US employment law, butā¦ Only if they wanted their nuts sued off them, I would imagine.
Good, maybe they can release a good game once again
but this isnt happening until 2023 so Bliz still has another year to destroy itself internally
It will take a year to clean up the stench left behind by the Bobbie Kotick era of Activision/blizzard
Heās not leaving, itās still going to be the "Bibby Kotickā era.
The press release states clearly that Kotick will leave at the end of the transaction.
Ah, fair enough.
I donāt like these movement, on the short term could translate in better quality games, certainly blizzard lost their craft ability long ago, still I donāt like this capitalist monopolistic tendency, just like how Disney bought just everything they wanted.
I donāt want a game industry with just two big companies owning most products and crushing indies and smaller companies. Because we are headed right that direction.
As I said in another placeā¦ maybe microsoft is making a big brain move and get rid of the activison part and uses Blizzard as a stand alone again that may deliver good games again.
Theyāll still be a corporate managing hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars worth of cash for their investors, thatās one of the things that breeds risk-aversion, large-scale corporate structures & most of the things that players love to hate.
If you were managing that amount of resources, wouldnāt you want to have controls in place to prevent fraud (a legal requirement, even in the US) & allow relevant people oversight?
Actually, the press release didnāt explicitly say that.
Nah, is all about blowing out their competitors, mainly Sony and Nintendo. I expect aside of the publishing aspect, dev studios will remain quite independent.
Blizzard will never go back to make era-defining games, that company only has the name and the IPs, the visionaries and genius devs left the company long ago.
In the third paragraph, as someone that has been through many MA transactions, once the new blood takes over the old blood leaves as a part of the transaction. I will have to re-read the updated 10K 10Q and 8K forms again that were a part of the revised release.
Edit: Alright so re-read it is Kotick is no longer the āheadā Activision Blizzard or of the new Microsoft Gaming as of the completion of the transaction. It does the forward looking statement make use of the ownership change rule which makes it sound that Kotick has the option to stay or leave, but Microsoft still has the right to make the change once the transaction is complete.
I agreeā¦ I watched a very interesting interview with David Brevik a few weeks ago about how they designed Diablo originally (specifically how they changed from a turn based idea to realtime) and it struck me how much of this original creativity and āvisionā still exists at the bigger game studiosā¦ Iād say that Blizzard might be ābiggerā but its a shadow of its former selfā¦
As a general player (with little insight into the workings of these behemoths) I get the impression that even if the best people stay, they are just worried about the bottom line/shareholders and the smaller independent devs are the ones that are actually making the most impact in terms of coming up with new games etcā¦
I just think of CD Projekt Red and how well they did with the Witcher series - culminating in W3 being one of the most brilliant games ever (imho) only taking 3.5years ($80mill), and having nowhere near the problems, delays and costs ($310mill) that Cyberpunk has hadā¦
Bigger in the gaming industry doesnt, imho, translate into betterā¦ and quite honestly, once the penny pinchers get involved, the players tend to be the ones that suffer the mostā¦
Thatās because, ultimately, the shareholders are where the power lies. The shareholders have the power to remove any/all of the directors. Itās normal to worry about what your boss thinks about your performance.
Yipā¦ but its also the achilies heel of large corporationsā¦ Whatever your opinion of Apple might be, when Jobs & Wosniak left due to being unable/not allowed to follow the direction they wanted to (i.e. take a chance on new tech/future) and Apple flounderedā¦ Jobs was brought back and allowed to innovate and voila, the rest is History.
I have worked in corporations where the bosses were absolute idiots thinking of the bottom line instead of the whole picture and innovations and ideas by the competitors ultimately left them in the dustā¦
Bigger is not always better and greedy shareholders who follow the money exclusively and dont understand the industry are a surefire way of driving any future into the groundā¦
Well, shareholders at the end are investors, they put their money in the line, and expect results in return, is very hard to convince them to just wait over the years for the next big hit, as they want more and more benefits NOW, they are investing on a company and they donāt care what the company produces.
And thereās very little to do about it, is how big companies operate, and going against the system could mean going bankrupt with a successful product.
When Activision, a company that makes a COD per year merged with Blizzard, a company that have very long development cycles over many years to fully develop a product, you can expect problems there.
And there are so many more issues, like the rock star syndrome some employees at blizzard acquired, going totally out of touch with their community, all the workplace culture scandal, how they were steadily losing subscribers from their main source of income: WoW. How they betrayed their fans with a product that directly messed up old Warcraft 3 users with Warcraft 3 reforged, a product based on lies, half-baked, stripped of existing features, and buggy as hellā¦ And we can go on and onā¦ so depressing.
That is āinvestingā. Itās not expecting results extremely quickly. Investing takes time and induces a risk. Thatās what many so-called āinvestorsā have forgotten today.