19th January 2022, 3:27 PM
(19th January 2022, 1:59 PM)Dark Jaguar Wrote: So much to think about here...
Bobby Kotick is being directly rewarded for the horrible things he did and the culture he encouraged in that company. I mean this. This purchase didn't happen without what happened to the stock. The bad publicity we fostered has directly encouraged this behavior in other CEOs once they see just how well Kotick is going to profit from all this. It will be the most wonderous and dream fulfilling "firing" anyone could even conceive of. He hurt employees and women in particular, and his every wish is being fulfilled as a result. To put it another way, karma itself is rewarding him for his evil by having all of his joys come true at once. Those he wronged will be all the worse off when he's gone. This is... a miserable world we live in, isn't it? Even our efforts to hold him accountable have only ENABLED this, indirect though the cause and effect may be, they are inextricably linked.
This is kind of true, but kind of not. I mean, it seems clear that the reason why this happened is because of Microsoft taking advantage of Activision-Blizzard's share price going down because of their serious harassment scandals. First the share price goes down, then MS pounces and offers an amount of money that pre-scandal would not have been enough. Kotick decided to accept after looking around for better offers and not finding one.
Is this Kotick's every dream? Probably not; he probably wanted to continue being CEO of a major company, as he has been for over 30 years now, you know? Being a subsidiary of a massive corporation's not quite the same, I doubt this was his dream. And particularly not for less money then he could have gotten before.
You are right that he will come out of this ahead, though. He will get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from this, and though he is already a billionaire so I don't know what he'll do with even MORE money, he's certainly the type to at least like that part of it.
Quote:Meanwhile, this singular purchase totally 10x the price Pixar or Lucasarts or Marvel cost Disney to buy. No, this is "Buying Fox itself" money. The end result? Whatever you may think of Microsoft, especially these days, they have "won". I don't mean they won the console wars. I mean they won on a meta level. They won the gaming industry now and extended for decades to come. The console wars are nothing to this behemoth. One console may fail and another succeed, and it matters not to this cosmic being roaming among the lessers like Sony and Nintendo. They are "above" that now. A few failed console generations can't bankrupt them any more, or even come close to it.
The next purchase is nigh. It'll take someone playing in MS's court to do it, but someone is going to end up buying EA. That'll be it then.
There are probably a few companies that can at least come pretty close to matching Microsoft's money, but not many. Has MS won? Well, buying Bethesda and Activision sure is a major play towards "winning", yes. They haven't put Sony out of business, but if they make most of Activision's games MS platform exclusive they will seriously damage Sony, that much is obvious. And Sony does not have the money to compete, not unless they get bought by one of the other giant tech companies. Consolidation continues.
And that's the big question here, on the continuing consolidation in the videogame industry. It is something that has been happening for some time, as the Embracer Group and Tencent buy small to midsized developers left and right while Microsoft buys large publishers, and it's a pretty significant issue now. I think it shows several things, but most importantly, that development costs keep increasing. As development costs for AAA games keep going up and up and up, companies need more and more ways to make money to pay for development. And selling to an even larger company with more revenue streams is one way to do that. More microtransactions and gatcha is another way, subscription services are a way, and raising the price of games is as well. Or, more likely, most to all of those things. Because the goal of a company is to make money and increase their profits over time. This is of course not infinitely possible, but they'll try as hard as they can to pretend that it is.
The other major thing the consolidation shows is that while there has been massive consolidation, it is not yet to the point of convincing governments to take action to stop it, and this almost certainly won't change that. Companies also naturally consolidate over time, unless governments act to force competition by trust-breaking. I don't think the game industry has gotten to the point of governments breaking up the big companies, but as more and more small developers are bought by larger ones, and large developers by even larger ones, we may get to that point eventually... unless the government doesn't care and would be fine with only a handful of companies running the whole industry, small indies aside. We are heading towards that future. But given how most industries in this country now are run by only a few companies -- think of how few companies own most American food products, and such -- expecting government action is probably pretty unlikely. There was antitrust action against Microsoft once, of course, but I don't think that just buying Bethesda and Activision gets them back to that point of dominance; Xbox is, right now, still a third-place platform, after all.
On another note, Microsoft now owns a pretty stunning amount of PC gaming history's back catalog, and I hope they do good things with it. I like Microsoft reasonably well enough and have an Xbox Series X and an okay (if now dated) PC. They do have monopolistic tendencies, but also currently have pretty good backwards compatibility and gaming history policies and have great platforms, and pretty good games too. Of Activision-Blizzard's possible purchasers -- and very few companies can afford $60 billion! -- Microsoft buying them probably is the least bad option. If it had been Facebook, or Apple, or Google, or Amazon, I think things would be much worse... but still, it is unfortunate that this is the future we are in now, where only the giants survive in this industry and smaller developers are going extinct. Having a larger variety of publishers making games made things more interesting and led to more variety than you get when it's mostly just from a couple of companies. But between natural capitalistic consolidation and skyrocketing costs, those days are ending. I like Microsoft and greatly dislike Sony, but if MS does actually win by just buying most of the major publishers? That's not really how you want to win... but oh well, that's capitalism.
Of course, MS probably doesn't want to actually put Sony out of business, THAT might interest the antitrust lawyers... they just want them weakened. So they probably would not buy literally everyone even if they could.