News broke late Tuesday evening about the potential sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft’s Xbox. While we have seen Activision Blizzard stumble off a cliff after their various lawsuits in 2021, this still comes as a shock to the gaming industry.
Never have we seen a “Triple A” game developer and publisher (Zynga isn’t one) fail so utterly and completely that they would require a buyout from another industry titan. A whopping $68.7 billion in buyout is unheard of until today.
Corporate Sexism to remain?
While speculations and imaginations run wild before the buyout is confirmed, there is one thing everyone is worried about: Will Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick still be at the helm upon acquisition? Yes, THAT Bobby Kotick; the same one who, under his watch, allowed a “Frat Boy” culture at the company that landed them with a suit by The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing for discrimination against female employees. There’s even a trending topic on twitter named #FireKotick. We believe this hashtag is rather self-explanatory.
Corporate Greed will grow
That may be enough to continue the boycott of all Blizzard games for now; but it gets worse. Remember the articles we put out a couple of weeks back on NFTs and the metaverse? Apparently, in a separate press release from Microsoft, this acquisition “will provide building blocks for the metaverse.” We said it before and we’ll say it again, keep your NFTs out of our games.
Esports will… uh…
It is safe to say that Neither Xbox nor Microsoft has any expertise in the esports arena. Other than Halo Esports, little to no Microsoft games come to mind when it comes to popular esports titles. Even then, Halo Esports isn’t even all that popular, sporting a meagre 179k followers on Twitter and 580k followers on Twitch. This can be heavily contrasted with Riot’s 6.1M followers on Twitch alone.
With the disaster that was Overwatch League, forgive us for having little to no confidence on how esports will be run hereafter.
What does this mean for Sony and Playstation?
In the short term, not much. While there are still die-hard fans trying to defend the blasphemy that is Activision Blizzard, or simply still playing World of Warcraft due to their sunk cost fallacies, these numbers are already dwindling. The amount of spring cleaning needed for Xbox to start extracting value out of this buyout would take at least two years.
Obviously, Microsoft still sees some value to be extracted from the dying publisher and its IPs so we best keep our eyes peeled as they rummage through what they believe to be a gold mine.
The truth is, while we can still daydream about the fictional future where Master Chief joins the fray in Heroes of the Storm or firing away at Reinhardt’s shield in Overwatch, let’s all temper our expectations, keep our fingers crossed and hope this all turns out as well as it can possibly be. (It probably won’t)
