Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard was significant news today, both for the scope of the deal and its shock value. But we shouldn’t be too surprised. That was inevitable. A handful of companies have always wanted to own everything, and nothing will stop them.
The proposed sale – for technical reasons I have to remind you that it still has to be approved – includes some earth-shattering numbers. $70 billion is counterfeit money, a bogus sum normally reserved for government budgets and defense deals. The union of these two companies with all these attributes and all these games alongside a home console and a hugely popular subscription service instantly changed the entire shape of the video game industry.
But a deal like this was always going to happen sooner or later, and if it hadn’t been Microsoft and Activision, it would have been Sony and EA or Tencent and Ubisoft or someone else who would have bought something else. Because that’s how it works. Video games are trapped in the same hellish systems as everyone else on this planet and subject to the same cruelly unfair, almost dystopian rules.
Everything revolves around money. everything. It’s all about constant growth and soaring share prices and dividends while everything just keeps getting worse for us as game lovers, from exploitative microtransactions to substandard launches to the looming threat of NFTs.
It’s like Microsoft just can’t help it, even though they’re literally already the second richest company in the world planet, a company that already makes video game consoles, was already a game publisher, owned game studios, and created some of the biggest games in the world. They couldn’t help it because there is no rest for the rich. Corporate inertia means there’s no satisfaction in being big enough or powerful enough or wealthy enough when there’s always opportunity — and shareholder demand more.
It’s almost comical that Microsoft spent $70 billion on a company called Activision Blizzard King, the result of mergers between three previously independent (and hugely successful in their own right!) companies brought together just to please some investors to raise more money, just bought up for this company in the end. There’s always a bigger fish!
Please remember that this is not a normal purchase. There’s simply no precedent for a sale of this magnitude in the video game industry. The biggest acquisition before that was the $12 billion that Take-Two paid for Zynga … earlier this month. The greatest before that was the $8 billion Tencent paid for Supercell. Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is in a whole different stratosphere.
To put it in perspective, both financially and culturally, this is a “Disney buys Pixar and Star Wars.” and Marvel” scenario. Disney’s monolithic dominance of popular culture over the past decade has been absolute, and it sucks. It’s been in sight all these years, ruined everything from the rest of the film business to theaters, and is the kind of big-scale deal that’s now coming to video games too, like the grim reaper meme going door-to-door.
Look at the consolidation in other industries. Amazon is devouring every store in America and crushing entire cities. Google and Apple know everything about you, selling every ad on the planet and destroying the news media in the process. Almost anything you buy at a grocery store is owned by only ten companies.
It’s boring and dangerous (monopoly is, ironically, terrible for a free and open market), but even grimmer than economic realities is the fact that there is no place for justice in a system where only the pursuit of profit counts. Bobby Kotick deserves to be booted from Activision Nothing
What Yes, really However, what has upset me today is not this deal itself – like I said, this came regardless of who the parties involved were – but what it means. This isn’t a one-off shock buy where every other video game related company will now just sit back and think wow, that’s bad news for us, but we’re just going on like nothing happened and hoping for that best . No, because that system is sick and dysfunctional and the only remaining impetus for the competition is to do the same, consider this:
That’s the future. There’s no way boardrooms from EA to Ubisoft to Sony won’t be packed this week as executives panic about their options for something similar because their only instinct is to conform. To keep up, let those stock prices go up until there are only 2-3 companies left at the top of the food chain and things are a little worse for the rest of us. Because they don’t know anything else.
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