Last night, the news of Microsoft's official announcement of the acquisition of Activision Blizzard shocked the entire Internet community, and the specific content of the transaction is: Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard at a price of $95 per share, a total of $68.7 billion, and the transaction will be completed around 2023.
Activision Blizzard's official Twitter also confirmed the news on the top tweet, accompanied by a picture of Activision Blizzard Family Bucket adding to xbox.
What, you ask me where Hearthstone went? Harm, this is not enough location, wait for the next time to arrange a C bit for Hearthstone!
As a veteran Internet surfer, bad reviewer Jun has been traversing the Internet for so many years, and he has seen a lot of big news, but I have never seen such a scene.
After all, one is the "Blizzard Dad" of all the players, and the other is one of the few members of the "trillion dollar club" in the world at present, and the news of these two combinations is really difficult not to be shocked, it can be called the grandfather's youth combination spicy!
Now the Internet circle is a hot spot, the stem map is coming, this time of course is no exception, the acquisition news came out, a large number of stem maps were made overtime by various sand sculpture netizens.
For example, the rich man who plays "Batman" and "Iron Man" shows Microsoft's powerful "banknote ability".
Sony: What is your superpower? Microsoft: I'm super rich. ▼
Some people addEd Overwatch to a Windows-included game.
Of course, there are also those who have added Blizzard Family Bucket to Office 365.
Some netizens simply made a finished game interface display directly, that is, "Spider Hearthstone".
There's also the "let me see you for real" memes.
This huge amount of terrier pictures are all "fresh goods" that emerged overnight, which shows how high the attention of netizens to this matter is.
And the impact of this matter is not only within the player group, but even the official media have been alarmed.
By the way, the total amount of this transaction is equivalent to almost 436 billion yuan, which is similar to a whole NetEase.
HK$537.66 billion is equivalent to approximately RMB437.87 billion▼
The deal has unsurprisingly become the largest acquisition in the history of the game today, and it is not one of them.
The huge number of this transaction comes mainly from two reasons.
On the one hand, because Activision Blizzard, as an old game manufacturer, although it has become infamous in recent years, its revenue is booming, and the price is naturally not low.
On the other hand, people Activision Blizzard is willing to sell, but also someone has the intention to pay this money, looking around the world, now can pay out $68.7 billion buyers are also very few, Microsoft is one of them.
Even for a long time to come, nothing should break this record.
Unless one day suddenly broke a news like Apple's acquisition of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Amazon's purchase of Tencent games and so on.
One of the things that is very interesting in the news is that Microsoft is trading in a "cash" manner, and there is no operation such as equity replacement in the merger and acquisition of general large companies.
Blizzard's current CEO, Bobby Kotick, will remain in office until the deal is completed.
After the completion of the transaction, all activision Blizzard's business will be reported to Phil Spencer, CEO of Xbox Games.
What does this mean? This shows that the senior management of Activision Blizzard has no nostalgia for their own company, and when they take the money, they simply leave cleanly, and they do not retain any equity, which also shows that they are not very optimistic about the future of the company.
And Microsoft is willing to take out so much money to buy Activision Blizzard, certainly not to do charity, after all, if this thing will lose money, who will spend money?
So the question is, microsoft buy Activision Blizzard diagram what?
Activision Blizzard's three main subsidiaries are Activision Publishing, King and Blizzard Entertainment, the former two of which own two well-known IPs, Call of Duty and Candy Crush.
Blizzard Entertainment has many "Blizzard" IPs such as Diablo, StarCraft, Overwatch, warcraft and so on.
So you can guess who is the most profitable of the three companies? Who has the most monthly active users?
The answer is that King has the most monthly active users and is also the most profitable, while Blizzard Entertainment has the fewest monthly active users and contributes the least revenue.
And all the negative news about Activision Blizzard in recent years is basically a moth from Blizzard Entertainment.
For example, the "World of Warcraft" department went on strike due to corporate sexual harassment, the "Diablo" director was fired, the mobile game was delayed, and so on.
These negative news have caused a large number of executives from Blizzard Entertainment to leave, and Blizzard Entertainment can be said to be a mess inside.
Coupled with the fact that its companies have not developed new IPs for so many years, players are gradually losing, even if the company's revenue is growing, Activision Blizzard has to consider "selling itself".
On the other hand, Microsoft, in fact, since the new CEO Nadella took office, Microsoft has not stopped acquiring game companies in recent years.
Nadella's first $1 billion deal was the $2.5 billion acquisition of Minecraft's developer Mojang.
Phil Spencer then took over, acquiring a large number of game studios and spending $7.5 billion on ZeniMax Media in March.
Its studios include Bethesda, id software, Arkane Studios, etc., and have a large number of well-known games such as Fallout, Doom, Death Cycle, and Humiliation.
Coupled with Activision Blizzard, which was finalized yesterday, Microsoft's games division already has more than 30 game studios.
And the works of these studios are all in XGP.
XGP is a membership service launched by Microsoft, users pay a little money every month, and the games in Microsoft's game library are played casually!
What Halo, Hellblade: Senna's Sacrifice, Death Loop, Doom, Age of Empires, play whatever you like.
Phil Spencer has also said that Microsoft will try to include Games that automatically see Blizzard in Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass as much as possible.
In this series of big moves, who should be worried about the most? That's right, Sony!
Today alone, Sony's stock price has fallen by nearly 13 percent, its biggest drop since 2014.
All along, Microsoft has not been Sony's opponent on the console game side, and it can even be said that no matter the console sales or exclusive games, Sony has been hammered on the ground.
No way, although it has been involved in the game industry for more than 20 years, Microsoft is still too "young", and when he entered the industry, he had several big mountains such as Nintendo, Sony, and Sega in front of him.
In the last generation, although the Xbox secretly developed well, relying on its own hard work and opponents' pendulum to surpass some competitors, it was still much worse than Sony.
After so many years, Microsoft has also figured out that making money by selling hosts is only a small head after all, and the real money is to provide follow-up services to players.
And what is the best service for players? It's a subscription play service that looks like a white prostitute!
Yes, I buy games, you come to play, you don't have to think about buying physical or electronic versions, and don't worry about whether you can refund if it's not fun, just buy a month's membership to try, hundreds of games as you choose, you can always find a game you love to play!
But the premise of this matter is that they have enough games for players to choose, so Microsoft began to buy and buy.
After Microsoft's crazy use of banknote capabilities, the "Xbox Universe" can now be described as a star shining.
Has "Battlefield", "Call of Duty", "Halo" three major FPS games, "Warcraft", "StarCraft", "Age of Empires" and other RTS handles, with almost all american RPG games and sports games and so on...
To sum up, as long as I have enough good games, more and more people will come to buy my membership.
And this is why Microsoft paid a lot of money to buy Activision Blizzard: I don't care if your management is rotten, I want your game IP, and your up to 400 million monthly active users.
Game IP can expand XGP's game library and increase XGP's appeal.
And those more than 400 million monthly active users, in order to be able to play these Activision Blizzard games and their new works in the future, everyone may be a potential "XGP member".
So do you think it's all worth it? Can I earn my money back?
I think yes, don't look at the current XGP 9.99 A month, but if the Activision Blizzard comes in, suppose it rises to $12.99 a month, but "Diablo 4" looks like it is about to be released, for it to spend this money, you can also play hundreds of other masterpieces, it seems that it is not unacceptable?
In case, Microsoft really bought 70% or 80% of the game industry's "Jiangshan" by relying on the ability to pay money, and it sells you $19.99 a month, which is quite reasonable, right?
Don't say it's impossible, I can only say that one day it really increased in price, it must be when XGP has a reason for you to choose it.
Not to mention the current world, IP is a printing machine, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard, in hand this big pile of IP casually engage in some linkage, movies, animation, money is not rushing to come?
Do you think Microsoft's money-throwing operation is somewhat familiar? This is the Disney of the game world.
Not to mention that the impact of Microsoft's XGP model on the industry is very huge, and it is rumored that Sony intends to launch a service called Spartacus to fight XGP.
Predictably, Activision Blizzard will never be the last game company Microsoft has acquired, after all, XGP subscribers are only 25 million now.
This number is still very small compared to the total population of billions of games around the world, if this time the effect is not good, then Microsoft will definitely continue to buy, from Microsoft's ambitions to see that his goal is not only tens of millions of players.
For old Blizzard players like Bad Reviewer, at least think of "Diablo 4", "Overwatch 2", "World of Warcraft 10.0" and what can be looked forward to, right?
Incidentally, former Microsoft vice president Mike Ybarra is said to have joined Blizzard after leaving in 2019, and he was previously responsible for the Xbox Live and XGP businesses.
Today, three years later, Activision Blizzard was acquired by Microsoft, which is very similar to the scene when Nokia was acquired by Microsoft.
Think of the news I saw the other day.
Sozai, you have to be careful!
Author: Xiaofa Editor: Xiao Xinxin
Images, sources:
Do you know, what role did former Microsoft vice president Mike Ybarra play in this Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard? What is the real situation?
Bloomberg ， Microsoft Buys Scandal-Tainted Activision in Bet on Metaverse
The verge ， Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion
Executives have successively left players continue to lose Activision Blizzard Why does "Blizzard" continue?