I agree with most of this, but this isn't an argument for Activision-Blizzard merging with Microsoft, this is an argument that Activision-Blizzard shareholders need to throw out Bobby Kotick and his folks, and replace them with competent leadership (or really, anyone with a pulse who won't union-bust and won't sexually harass people, would be more qualified at this point).
It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes.
> The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop
Maybe. But it seems more likely that Microsoft would have cleaned up leadership a tiny bit and then left Activision-Blizzard to slowly quietly rot away, in much the same way that Microsoft has treated Halo.
Shareholders can get rid of Bobby Kotick and do all kinds of other leadership changes and it's not going to fix some of the problems that some of us were hopeful for.
Microsoft has shown some resolve when it comes to supporting games in spaces that aren't absolute gold mines, specifically in the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre. They are publishers of Age of Empires, which all things considered is a drop in the bucket when revenue wise, yet it still is allowed to exist. Blizzard (via Activision) mostly exploits or kills all of it's "less-than" products, which increasingly is almost everything when compared to the behemoths like Call of Duty and Candy Crush.
It was probably a bit of wishful thinking, but some of us were actually excited that Microsoft would get access to some of the games that don't get supported very well while the customer base is literally holding their wallets out asking to pay to support the game. For example, Heroes of the Storm does have a dedicated following and we're ready to pay $10/mo or something similar to help support the game, but it's literally spent the last three years patching after every time it runs because it's broken. It still plays fine, but it eats gigabytes per month of bandwidth all because nobody cares enough to modify an XML file or something.
The same is true of Diablo II: Resurrected. It's a great game, but we can't pay for extra stash tabs which in the ARPG genre is kind of the go-to monetization strategy these days. Everyone would be fine paying $5 for a few stash tabs and it would be a good way to support ongoing development and maybe pave the way to getting the long awaited "Act 6" content everyone would love or even just allow the team to spend a bit more time adding more end-game meta content.
See I go back and forth about this. I feel the same optimism in some ways about Microsoft getting their hand on the wheel...but they've also let a lot of great IP's languish that they already hold. Rare is a shell of its former self and is basically only around because of Sea of Thieves which really took a while to get the ball rolling, Lionhead hasn't released a game in over a decade, Halo is on life support, Gears is doing ok, Forza is doing good-ish I guess. Lots of examples to choose from, sadly.
That's a good counter-example. Forza Horizon 5 was released to much acclaim in terms of the actual game, but the release was plagued with terrible microtransaction problems that overshadowed it and caused the player base to revolt.
Agreed. But tossing leadership & getting new supposedly 'better' leadership is high risk, whereas an acquisition is low-risk and more reliable at getting short term gains.
There's a substantial portion of the tech startup sphere whose entire goals are: get big enough to get acquired and get a big bag from the sale. It kind of runs counter to current sentiment around here.
> It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes.
It's why they are languishing. It's the "resource curse". On the contrary, It's one of the reasons why Microsoft is a killer machine. They are disciplined and focused. That kind of discipline stifles away creativity (like Skype and yammer).
One is a solution that fixes the issue now, the other is us hoping for shareholders to eventually do the morally right thing (which is a silly thing to expect).
It's ridiculous that a company with this many talented people, and this much treasured IP, is languishing in this state and tied up with such easy-to-avoid internal-only mistakes.
> The Microsoft acquisition would have likely breathed some new life into the company and allowed corporate to clean up shop
Maybe. But it seems more likely that Microsoft would have cleaned up leadership a tiny bit and then left Activision-Blizzard to slowly quietly rot away, in much the same way that Microsoft has treated Halo.