On January 20, MarkketWatch disclosed the termination clause in the terms of The Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition. If Microsoft is unable to complete the acquisition of Activision Blizzard due to antitrust issues, microsoft needs to pay a termination fee of $2 billion to $3 billion to Activision Blizzard.
There are many manufacturers in the game industry, but the host platform is only active in Microsoft and Sony, of which Sony's PlayStation has been suppressing sony Xbox. If Microsoft completes the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Sony will face almost extinction. On the day Microsoft announced its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Sony stock plummeted 10 percent.
Domestic gamers may not quite understand why Activision Blizzard can have such a big influence, after all, the Activision Blizzard games we come into contact with are generally OW, Hearthstone, Warcraft, Storm Heroes, etc., collectively known as "dead game". In fact, Activision Blizzard is divided into three departments: Activision, Blizzard and King, with a total revenue of up to $8 billion in 2020, ranking sixth among global game companies, and pressing EA and T2 (data source: Xue Yunkui, professor of accounting at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, limited to game companies with public earnings reports).
More importantly, Activision holds the hottest game IP in the European and American markets - Call of Duty. Call of Duty is a "year-old" game that releases new titles every year, and from 2010 to 2020, except for the two years when GTA5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 were released, the U.S. game sales champion in all other years was Call of Duty. If Call of Duty is no longer on the PlayStation platform in the future, then Sony is likely to lose the US market directly and lose most of the European market.
Therefore, It is not impossible for Microsoft to complete the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. For Activision Blizzard, it is naturally more like to be acquired by Microsoft, find a rich backer, and the pressure to develop games in the future will definitely be less. Over the years, Activision Blizzard has had many games that have been cut or listed early due to insufficient capital investment, resulting in worse and worse reputation.
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Even if the acquisition cannot be completed, Activision Blizzard's $3 billion (about 19 billion yuan) is not bad, which is about a year's profit of Activision Blizzard. You know, in 2020, T2 game companies will only have annual revenue of $3.37 billion, and after deducting the cost of expenses, T2 may only earn $3 billion in a few years. T2's most famous studio is R Star, and GTA and Red Dead Redemption are all R Star developments.
However, the status of the game industry is not so high after all, Sony is not away from "Call of Duty", according to Xiao Lei, Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has a high success rate. Looking at NVIDIA next door, Lao Huang has been tossing and turning for two years to acquire ARM, all due to antitrust restrictions, and has not been successful so far.