On the evening of January 18, a merger news detonated the long-dormant game circle. According to the China Fund News, Microsoft issued a statement saying that it will buy Activision Blizzard in full cash for $95 per share, with a total transaction value of $68.7 billion, or about 430 billion yuan.
It will be the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history.
Not long before, the gaming circle had just experienced a wave of shock. On January 10, 2022, Take-Two announced that it would acquire all of the outstanding shares of game maker Zynga in the form of about $12.7 billion in cash and shares. Who is Take-Two? Take-Two is the head office behind the development and distribution of Grand Theft Auto, Civilization, NBA 2K and other series of games.
Because Zynga is very good at developing games on the mobile side, some netizens joked when the acquisition news was announced that they would not play "Red Dead Redemption" on mobile phones in the future.
Now that Microsoft has acquired Blizzard, the paragraphs on the Internet are flying all over the sky.
Some netizens directly came to a pun, saying: God closed a door for Blizzard, and he will open a window (Windows) for him.
Source: Weibo
There is also a screenshot of the Windows XP interface directly released by the danziman, which means that in the future, Microsoft's mini-games can play Overwatch in addition to empty solitaire and minesweeper.
Source: Network
Some netizens directly put a picture with deep meaning. Sony asked Microsoft: What is your superpower? Microsoft replied: I am rich.
With the acquisition completed, Microsoft will become the world's third-largest game company in terms of revenue in the game development and production business, surpassing Nintendo in one fell swoop, after Tencent and Sony.
Whether Microsoft is willful or wants to go further, it is undoubtedly the "number one player" who "recharges the faith" in real life. As early as 2014, Microsoft spent about 2.5 billion to acquire Mojang Studios, the developer of the popular game "Minecraft"; in 2020, Microsoft once again invested in the development of the parent company of "The Elder Scrolls" and "Fallout" series for $7.5 billion to develop the parent company of "The Elder Scrolls" and "Fallout" series.
Many analysts believe that this wave of acquisitions is intended to expand the content of the metaverse, enrich their own ecology, and make a good layout in advance towards the goal of building a world-class metaverse. So what will the nearly 70 billion days of "recharge" bring to Microsoft?
It is both an opportunity and a test
Huatai Securities believes that because Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that "games are currently the most dynamic and exciting entertainment category on all platforms today, and will play a key role in the development of meta-universe platforms", and Microsoft "is making deep investments in world-class content, communities and clouds to usher in a new era of games that puts players and creators first, and makes games safe, inclusive and open to everyone", Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard is actually accelerating the construction of its own meta-universe again.
Coupled with the fact that in 2021, Microsoft publicly released mesh, a digital productivity platform for mixed reality, at the Ignite conference held in November, and said that the game platform Xbox will also join the construction of the metaverse, and now the acquisition of Blizzard has to be associated with the continuous layout strategy of Microsoft metaverse.
But what can this 70 billion "willfulness" bring to Microsoft?
The current Activision Blizzard was formed in 2007 by the merger of Activision and Vivendi Entertainment (Blizzard's parent company). In 2013, Activision Blizzard became independent on its own, and also controlled a large number of IP that has always been there, such as World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Call of Duty, Diablo, Overwatch, StarCraft and so on. These game IPs are called the memories of youth by the post-80s and post-90s.
After acquiring Activision Blizzard, Microsoft will also own these IPs. At the same time, the number of subscribers to Xbox Game Pass under Microsoft's games business is growing at a high rate, and since its launch in June 2017, XGP's subscriber numbers have exceeded 25 million. According to the Oriental Fortune Network, Activision Blizzard has 400 million monthly active players, and this is what makes the gaming industry tremble, after the acquisition, these 400 million monthly active will greatly enhance XGP's market position. XGP itself is considered by a large number of players to be the most cost-effective game subscription members, and now joined the "Blizzard Gift Package", the core product matrix has once again expanded, and a large number of players have to call "buy buy buy".
However, the fans of these game IP are mainly post-80s and post-90s, and the main form of presentation is still on the PC side and the game console side, and now many young people of the Z generation are actually more familiar with mobile games. Therefore, spending 70 billion yuan to buy such a "big package", how to continue in the future should also be a problem that needs to be considered.
But the truth is that Activision Blizzard has not used these ORIGINAL MASS-BASed IPs to tell its own story in recent years.
Recently circulated on the Internet a ranking of the 50 most profitable IPs in the world. As the OG of the gaming world, Activision Blizzard has only two IPs shortlisted: Call of Duty and Warcraft. Warcraft, born in 1994, is even only ranked 38th.
And known as the "master" of the game world, Nintendo, its IP "Pokémon" is still sitting on the Diaoyutai, ranking first; now even the young mobile game king, Tencent, has begun to gradually occupy the list, occupying 5 rankings.
Although Activision Blizzard has a very large number of monthly active users, the rate of loss is also very fast. Nowadays, these old IPs have not told their own stories well, and they are gradually out of control like quicksand and disappear into nothingness. Microsoft does have a strong ability, not only has a unique voice on the PC side, but also has more room for various resources than Activision Blizzard itself and its former owners. How to take back these scattered wind and sand in your hands will be the biggest test for Microsoft's operation of Activision Blizzard.
End
A well-known blogger just posted an article about Blizzard games a few days ago, which roughly means "cheap and old, can still eat or not.". Yes, games no matter how they are, they belong to the category of entertainment. The reason why entertainment is attractive is not because of the rapid expansion of its capital and the fast coming of money, but because it is directly rooted in people's hearts, thought-provoking, and can bring people an "explosive" sense of perception and experience.
Activision Blizzard may indeed be a little old, and the content it does use outdated standards and pride, but this means that Microsoft's acquisition can be regarded as a wave of bottom-reading. If the cost of bottoming out is $70 billion, Microsoft can say that it has indeed ordered a valuable and exquisite street brick for the metacosm. But in the end, it is still necessary to look back and see that the game should be the biggest focus this time. If Activision Blizzard is the cornerstone of Microsoft's journey to the metaverse, then it may really be just a relatively beautiful brick, and why is it more than a brick on the broad road to the future world?
There are a lot of handmade bloggers on Station B, and refurbishing things from the past attracts a lot of traffic. Microsoft's wave of operations is like giving itself and Activision Blizzard a resounding public announcement of the future. So how Microsoft will create a future that shareholders in the past did not give Activision Blizzard, let's look forward to it together.
This article originated from the financial breakfast