Image source @ Visual China
Text | Photon Planet, author | Wen Yehao, Editor | Wu Xianzhi
On the evening of the 18th, Microsoft issued a statement saying that it would acquire Activision Blizzard at a price of $95 per share, with a total transaction value of $68.7 billion. After the transaction is completed, Microsoft will become the world's third-largest game company after Tencent and Sony.
Microsoft has been on the game track for more than 20 years, and what is the meaning behind the launch of the largest deal in the history of the game industry and the sale in full cash.
The IP dilemma of the game New Army
Obviously, Microsoft needs Blizzard. Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft's gaming business, once said, "As a tech company, you have to be in the gaming business. ”
Fast forward to around 2000, when Microsoft had occupied the PC scene through the Windows system, and home game consoles became the next city in Microsoft's business map.
To this end, Microsoft, which had just entered the game track, negotiated with the game console manufacturers at that time, but whether it was the down-and-out Sega, or Nintendo or Sony, they were unwilling to cooperate with Microsoft.
This is actually very easy to understand, the host manufacturer holds the game terminal, just by logging on to their own platform of the game commission can earn a lot of money, there is no reason to introduce an external operating system to let people share the cake.
Bumping into walls everywhere, but eager to enter the game, Microsoft finally played the "acquisition card". In 2000, Microsoft reached a cooperation agreement with game producer Bungie Studios, which created Microsoft's largest IP to date, Halo.
But publishers alone can't satisfy Microsoft's ambitions, and its eyes are clearly on the entire game market. Based on this, in November 2001, Microsoft released the original Xbox and sold it at a loss.
In the end, the original Xbox sold about 24 million units, helping Microsoft win the North American market, but because the cake of the Japanese market has been divided by Sony, Nintendo, and Sega, the original Xbox failed to stir up the noise.
It can be said that the original Xbox almost laid the pattern of the host Yusan (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) for the next 20 years, and to this day, North America is still Microsoft's home base, while the Japanese market Microsoft is still difficult to set foot.
It is worth noting that due to the technical level, early games are often based on specific device platform development, and it is difficult to achieve multi-platform compatibility. In order to attract more users, for a long time, the imperial three families have pursued an exclusive strategy, that is, exclusive games can only be released on their own platforms, and players can only buy game consoles as tickets.
However, at that time, Microsoft, as a new army, obviously could not compare with the old guns in the same track in terms of exclusive games. According to statistics, the average number of games purchased by users for the original Xbox console is only 3, while the sony PS2 in the same period is as high as double digits.
Even if Microsoft can spend money to sell hardware regardless of expenses, the game lineup will still be overshadowed, and in this context, the acquisition of IP has become Microsoft's only way out.
Therefore, looking back at The way Microsoft laid out the game track, it is better to say that it is the "history of smashing money" that is stacked by acquisitions again and again.
In addition to the many game development teams, before the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft had already made waves in the game industry with two blockbuster acquisitions.
In September 2014, Microsoft acquired Mojang AB, the developer of the well-known game Minecraft, for $2.5 billion. In March 2021, Microsoft closed a $7.5 billion acquisition of Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax.
As the world's best-selling video game ever, Minecraft has sold more than 200 million yuan in May last year, with 126 million monthly active users, and comes with a highly active player community, which can undoubtedly make up for the narrowing of the situation of exclusive game series players such as Microsoft's Halo and Gears of War.
Bethesda holds well-known IP such as "The Elder Scrolls", "Fallout", "Doom", "German Headquarters" and other well-known IPs that players are eagerly awaiting, and Microsoft has also confirmed that some of the games developed by Bethesda will be exclusively owned by its own platform.
Obviously, Microsoft has invested heavily in order to make up for its own weak IP camp.
And the same logic, placed on Activision Blizzard, also holds. As the world's largest third-party game manufacturer, Activision Blizzard's IP includes Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Hearthstone and so on.
"Call of Duty" as a New Year game, each stable sales of more than 10 million; "World of Warcraft", "Diablo" series spanning several generations of players, there are many emotional fans; "Overwatch" and "Hearthstone" as competitive games, have been in the field of e-sports...
It is no exaggeration to say that any of the above games are enough to affect the enthusiasm of players, not to mention that Microsoft is packaging it away this time. In this regard, Microsoft said: "Once completed, we will provide as many Activision Blizzard games in Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass." ”
As Microsoft's game subscription service, once users subscribe, they no longer have to pay separately for the game, and Game Pass currently has more than 25 million subscribers. It is reasonable to imagine that once the sales masterpiece "Call of Duty" lands on Microsoft Game Pass, its user volume is bound to rise significantly.
Based on this, when the news of the acquisition came out, the argument around "Sony's curtain next generation" immediately occupied the mainstream discourse on major game forums, which showed the power of Activision Blizzard IP.
Is IP the end of the game?
Why is IP important? First of all, high-profile IP comes with its own traffic, and traffic is an attribute that is urgently needed by manufacturers in the era of entertainment to death.
Taking Pokémon, which has been at the top of the global IP value list for many years, as a top IP that spans games, animation, comics and other fields, the total IP revenue has reached 109 billion US dollars so far. And in the field of games, the Pokémon IP still exerts its power. Looking at the original works, since 1996, the "Pokémon" IP works have sold around 10 millions of Nintendo GB, GBA, NDS, 3DS, and Switch consoles.
Although the picture scene of the recent "Pokémon Sword/Shield" has been complained about by players, the die-hards of the series have scolded GameFreak (the Pokémon IP holding company) while pushing its sales to the industry's leading 20 million. It is enough to illustrate the positive effect of IP on game sales.
In addition to traffic attributes, IP is also a guarantee of content quality. For the game track, such IP can significantly reduce the player's trust threshold.
In the case of the Zelda Legends series, the professional rating site Metacritic has an average score of around 90, which means that once a new game is released, players do not have to worry about the quality of their content.
However, as a common attribute of IP, the traffic and trust threshold has long been reflected in many aspects of the entertainment market. For the game track, the value of IP seems to be more than that.
Taking the next-generation console as an example, although Microsoft's Xbox Series X is ahead of Sony PS5 in hardware specifications, because its exclusive games have landed on the PC platform, the price of Xbox Series X in an idle trading platform in China can only be the same as that of PS5, and even surpassed by PS5 for a time.
Leaving aside factors such as the production capacity premium, the difference between hardware specifications is that players pay for Sony's exclusive IP, and in the face of Microsoft consoles that lack exclusive games, players do not seem to have much reason to buy.
Therefore, if the "Royal Three Families" want to win the battle of the host, IP blessing is indispensable. Among them, Nintendo, which holds the top IP such as "Mario" and "Pokémon", naturally has no so-called IP anxiety, while Sony and Microsoft, which are short-term, even if their IP does not take the exclusive route, are bound to keep their own game basic disk in an "exclusive" way.
The situation of the main engine battlefield is also the same in the domestic market. With the current tightening of the supervision of the domestic game market and the suspension of the version number, the domestic game industry is in the middle of a cold winter, and going to sea is obviously a better choice.
However, when you go to sea, you face a wider range of competition. Taking Tencent as an example, once it goes to sea, it is difficult to reproduce the domestic three-stage rocket model based on QQ and WeChat social traffic pools, and IP naturally becomes an outlet under the shackles.
In recent years, Tencent's Photonic Studio Group has cooperated with overseas manufacturers to successively put popular games such as "PUBG", "APEX" and "League of Legends" on mobile, while Tianmei Studio has cooperated with Nintendo to launch "Pokémon Collection".
And NetEase is naturally not idle, successively acting as an agent and cooperating in the development of "Pokémon Adventure", "Diablo: Immortal", "Harry Potter: Magic Awakening" and other works, in an attempt to break through IP.
Obviously, for domestic game manufacturers, IP is a shortcut to fame, but this does not mean that IP is the master key to open the road to success.
To this day, the heavy IP and light quality play is still the way for many game manufacturers to make money, and the so-called "film-game linkage" in previous years is one of them. In the heyday, various sets of IP skin-changing games emerged in an endless stream, and game manufacturers used IP to attract traffic, but ignored the polishing of the game kernel, which in turn led to traffic plummeting after the initial growth, becoming a homogenization product that no one cared about.
It can be seen that the "IP card" is not a path, only the kernel quality and operation are the "king explosions" that promote the success of the game.
Last year's blockbuster Cyberpunk 2077 is a good example, the producer CDProjetRED was once famous in the player circle with the "The Witcher" series, and its early publicity of "Cyberpunk 2077" wrote the term cyberpunk into the Internet context.
But with bugs and rough game products finally coming out, Cyberpunk 2077 became a joke in the eyes of players, and CDProjetRED's reputation as a "Polish donkey" (too honest in making the game, the quality of the game is quite high and unencrypted, so that the player lamented stupidity) reputation was also lost.
Therefore, although the IP war between the game giants is difficult, ip will not become the end of the game. If you insist on finding the end of the game, it may be that only the "game" itself is enough to bear its weight.