Today, the announcement of a huge acquisition without warning has blown up game fans around the world. On Tuesday morning, US time, Microsoft announced that it would buy game production company Activision Blizzard in full cash for $95 per share, with a total transaction value of $68.7 billion (about 436.5 billion yuan).
The deal is not only the largest acquisition in the global gaming industry to date, but also the largest acquisition Microsoft has made since its founding in 1975. In this transaction, Microsoft will obtain the operation and management rights of all studios under Activision Blizzard and its subsidiary King, and will also obtain the ownership of world-renowned game IP such as Call of Duty, Warcraft Series, Diablo, Overwatch, and Candy Crush Saga.
The acquisition is at a premium of about 45 percent, and the transaction will be conducted in all cash and is expected to close in June next year, according to calculations. After the news was issued, Activision Blizzard's stock price directly soared by more than 30% before today's market. For Activision Blizzard, which is at the center of various scandals, Microsoft's takeover will undoubtedly usher in an opportunity for nirvana rebirth. The completion of this transaction also means that Microsoft will become the third-highest-grossing game company in the world, after Tencent and Sony.
The future of the game industry may also change because of this historic deal.
Against the sky big acquisition, stunned game fans
Before today, this huge acquisition can be said to have almost no wind. Microsoft's sudden launch of the "banknote ability" to level the ground and thunder operation also completely stunned the global game fans.
Domestic netizens brushed this news, some sat up and quickly went to the official website to verify whether it was fake news, some mysteriously marked with a full screen exclamation point, and some game bloggers directly lay flat and said, "It's too big to comment." ”
And the hearts of foreign netizens can not be calm, indicating that it is obviously an ordinary Tuesday morning, just because of this acquisition news was directly stirred up.
For the largest acquisition in the history of the game industry, netizens also felt what is called the real "money can do whatever you want" in the "golden father" Microsoft. It is said that microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard costs its own profits for 14 months.
Of course, Activision Blizzard, as one of the world's largest game developers and publishers, has pocketed it, which is undoubtedly a great enhancement of its voice in the game industry for Microsoft, and further enriches the game content ecology of Xbox.
In this regard, netizens have also opened their minds and begun to ridicule Microsoft. Some people say, well, it looks like the Office 365 family is going to add a lot of new members.
Some people say that in addition to free solitaire, solitaire, and minesweeper, Microsoft's desktop mini-games can also add Overwatch to it.
Many Xbox players have begun to fantasize about using their own Game Pass to play various big game IPs under Blizzard such as "World of Warcraft" and "Hearthstone". Netizens have said that according to the development of This trend of Microsoft, Xbox will be expected to become the "first platform in the universe" in the future: with Xbox, you will have the whole world.
Previously, although Microsoft was the world's three largest game console manufacturers, although its overall game revenue ranked first in the world, most of its revenue came from console hardware, and the game business was not its main source of income. Last year, in terms of game development and production, Tencent ranked first in terms of revenue, Sony in second place, Nintendo in third place, and Then NetEase and Activision Blizzard. This time, after Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, it will leapfrog Nintendo in the game development and production business, ranking behind Tencent and Sony.
Microsoft CEO Nadella also said today that the deal will play a key role in the next step of Microsoft's metaverse development, believing that these game IPs will be a good entry point into the metaverse. And letting Microsoft engage in the metaverse is undoubtedly much better than Activision Blizzard to do it itself, after all, according to Blizzard's behavior in recent years, it is estimated that every day is thinking about how to sell paid mounts, paid illusions, paid race changes and the like in the metaverse.
The addition of these big IP under Activision Blizzard makes Microsoft like than Thanos' gloves to collect the Infinity Stones, the existing Minecraft, Old Roll, Fallout, Doom plus the Call of Duty, Warcraft, Darkness, Watch, 25 million Xbox subscribers plus Blizzard's nearly 400 million monthly active users around the world, will make Microsoft unstoppable, and rewrite the competition pattern of the game industry after that.
Microsoft enters the ownership, Activision Blizzard ushered in a new life?
As the world's oldest, largest and most influential game manufacturer, Activision Blizzard was once the "white moonlight" in the hearts of many game fans, and once had the reputation of "Blizzard production, must be a boutique". World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo... Twisting one out at will is a piece of the player's youth.
But for the lonely ending of Activision Blizzard's acquisition by Microsoft, players did not feel much regret, but almost all of them clapped their hands and applauded, and they all ran to microsoft to cheer up, hoping that Microsoft could lead Activision Blizzard to reinvigorate its strength. The reason for this is that the development of Activision Blizzard in the past few years has been too much, not only the level of game production has fallen seriously and is ugly, but also the scandals exposed at the management level of the company are also endless. This pile of piles piece by piece, but also let the player's heart break into glass slag little by little.
On the one hand, Blizzard seems to have forgotten its original intention and no longer takes the game production seriously. Once Blizzard is the guarantee of game quality, from StarCraft to Diablo 2, to Warcraft 3 to the pinnacle of World of Warcraft, occupying half of the entire PC game, but now Blizzard has become only left with fried cold rice and consumer player feelings.
In the history of Blizzard's press conference, there have been two very famous "brothers in red", from them, we may be able to glimpse how Blizzard fell. At the 2010 Blizzard Carnival, a guy in red asked Blizzard's chief content designer about a question about a game character in World of Warcraft, and soon after Blizzard immediately corrected the problem in the game, and deliberately added a red npc next to the character, called Brute Hammer Truth Examiner.
In 2018, Blizzard made a lot of warm-ups for Diablo and announced that it would debut in the carnival finale, which made all Diablo players' expectations soar to the highest, feeling that either Diablo 3 would have a major update or Diablo 4 was coming. However, when designer Wyatt Cheng finally threw out a mobile game called Diablo: Immortality, the scene was suddenly silent. At this time, a little brother in red stood up and issued a soul torture question, "Is this an outdated April Fool's Joke?" Wyatt Cheng could only say the classic sentence with an awkward smile, "Do you guys not have phones?" ”
Both "little brothers in red" have become classic images in Blizzard's history. It's just that the former reflects Blizzard's respect for players and inner love for the game, while the latter reflects Blizzard's pursuit of capital and disregard for players today.
On the other hand, the scandals within Blizzard can be said to be more ugly than the last. On July 22 last year, the California government formally filed a lawsuit against Blizzard in Los Angeles Superior Court and filed a 29-page investigation report with shocking details: there was serious sexual harassment and gender discrimination within Blizzard, female employees were subjected to long-term oppression and humiliation, and one person committed suicide. South Korea's previous sensational "Room N" incident was played out every day within Blizzard and became part of the company's "fraternity" culture for many years, even CEO Bobby Kotick was involved.
For the employees' reporting resistance, the company's human resources department and senior management are in a complicity, and often the whistleblower will not be punished in any way, but the whistleblower will be deliberately retaliated against - transfer, salary reduction, forced departure. In the past two years, Activision Blizzard has become a "cancer" in the game industry, making many outstanding young designers choose to leave or avoid it. The top brass of the company's original team has almost all left.
From the interview with Microsoft on the acquisition of Blizzard, it can also be seen that Microsoft has placed the reconstruction of Blizzard's internal culture in an important position, after all, if it only treats the symptoms and not the root cause, it cannot completely rewrite Blizzard's current decline. According to the latest news, Bobby Kotick, who led Blizzard all the way down, will step down immediately after the acquisition is completed, and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer will take over Blizzard's related matters in an all-round way.
Many players said that although they could only play Blizzard games by buying An Xbox in the future, they felt that Bobby Kotick was finally going to pack up and leave, and it felt like Blizzard had finally ushered in the dawn of rebirth.
Finally, to quote a netizen God comment: "God closes a door for Blizzard, and he will open a Windows for him." Today, hundreds of millions of players around the world are looking forward to the fact that under the leadership of Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, which has fallen to the bottom, can make a comeback and return to the altar.
Silicon Star Analyst Du Chen also contributed to this article.
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