Even if Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has set a sky-high purchase amount, the outside world is still shocked as to why Microsoft wants to eat Activision Blizzard, and why Activision Blizzard wants to be acquired, foreign media VentureBeat visited bobby Kotick, the current CEO of Activision Blizzard, perhaps from his statement, a glimpse of these high-level ideas.
Bobby Kotick said that the future of Activision Blizzard's products will require a variety of talents, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, data analysis, cloud architecture, network security, etc., and Activision Blizzard is currently very weak in these areas.
But these talents are hard to find and expensive, and they have to compete with top tech giants like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and Facebook.
Bobby Kotick, for example, facebook invests billions of dollars a year in the metaverse, and Nvidia is racing against the best AI and computer graphics talent, not to mention the same salary competition among its peers.
Incidentally, AI, machine learning, which seems to be less relevant to games, is the focus of the future of the Call of Duty series in bobby Kotick's eyes, and in the long run, he wants to create a perfect streaming of Call of Duty games.
Bobby Kotick said that in the past, Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have been discussing how to work together for many years. Just as Activision Blizzard was considering the future of the company above, Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, just called Bobby Kotick and proposed the idea of an acquisition.
Bobby Kotick felt that the relationship was very good, so it made sense to start thinking about what the resources they had could help each other, and the key to the final decision was the offer, because Microsoft was 45% above the stock price at that time. Bobby Kotick believes that the price of $95 per share is a very good deal for shareholders.
Talking about whether the deal will have antitrust questions, Bobby Kotick said that most of Microsoft's business is still not related to games, and they do not have a mobile platform product, so KING (the developer of "Candy Crush", one of the Activision Blizzard subsidiaries) is quite attractive to Microsoft, and they all know that more games will appear on mobile platforms in the next five years.
At the same time, Bobby Kotick revealed that Microsoft has assured them that it will make Activision Blizzard's content as possible available on more devices.
Bobby Kotick says a lot of people think Activision Blizzard is a big company, especially in the gaming industry. But compared to the mega-market capitalization, more than 500 billion of technology companies, when you see the scenery of these competitors, you have different ideas. And even if Activision Blizzard and EA become one, EA can't provide any help for Activision Blizzard, and it needs a bigger partner to play a role.
Bobby Kotick also gave practical examples, such as the guitar hero that he had not seen in a long time, Bobby Kotick said that he had actually always wanted to make the new guitar hero, but this was to be hardware, involving the entire manufacturing industry, the supply chain, and the chip shortage now, so he found that this was something they could not handle.
The second is Activision's previous launch of the game product "Skylanders" that wants to "integrate hardware and software", bobby Kotick said that one of the biggest mistakes in his life is that he believes that the wrong people mess up this product and then mess up the market, but Microsoft, which has the ability to make hardware, can do it.
Bobby Kotick was also asked if he would consider retirement next, and Bobby Kotick said that there is still a long way to go before the merger is approved and regulated, so he will continue to handle the business and smoothly integrate with Microsoft during this transition period.