Microsoft, Wow!

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Microsoft Corp. announced plans on Tuesday to acquire gaming giant Activision Blizzard Inc., the maker of immensely popular franchises including "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft," for $68.7 billion.

The companies jointly announced news of the all-cash deal on Tuesday, which involves tech giant Microsoft purchasing the controversy-marred gaming company for some $95 per share.  When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world's third-largest gaming company by revenue -- behind only Tencent and Sony . . .

Source:  This ABC News Article 

Microsoft makes strange moves a lot.

But as far as acquisition time goes, perhaps it's the right time. The negative press drove the value down probably.

I can't think of a recent product I wanted from that publisher...

I stopped paying for my WoW account when the "Kung Fu Pandas" expansion was announced.

Just to put this in perspective, Disney paid something like 4 billion for the entire Star Wars franchise, the amount of money in games is just staggering.

I think it is a smart move on Microsoft’s part. They get to become a large player in the video game world along with selling the operating systems that they can run on. It looks like they waited until a scandal occurred to get a better deal on “damaged goods”. If it goes through, I think they will get bigger in multiple ways. They might revamp the products to get more people playing their stuff. All money in their bank from what I see.

Disclaimer: I have been a long time fan of Activision games, going back to the Atari 2600 era of the late 1970s-early 1980s. In fact I have a factory sealed copy of the original Pitfall by that company sitting in my collection. Never got into WOW, as it is just not my thing. I do know people who got severely addicted to WOW to the point that they lost their jobs and dropped out of college for it.

That's my read as well, even with the premium they're paying on the stock, they're still under the all time high before the turmoil drove the price down.

Side-note; I was working at Microsoft as a game tester on the original Xbox pre-release, they were super aggressive back then buying up studios and personnel, the weirdest one for me was actually passing Howard Phillips in the hall, who I'd grown up seeing in the pages of Nintendo Power as their sort of unofficial living mascot. He actually gave my team a hilariously profanity laced briefing about what we were and were not allowed to talk about outside of the building, with cheat codes being the most heavily guarded secret at the time, though they wanted us to generally keep things vague about the games until they were released. This was very different than Nintendo, which ran their PA&D department like a counter-intelligence agency and made you sign super restrictive NDAs and didn't even want you talking about what you were working on in the cafeteria, lest the wrong ears hear it.

Yip. Approximately zero of my dollars go into the gaming biz, however, I do read business news headlines about the industry here and there and every once in a while I see something noteworthy that Could be investment worthy.

Most recently I read that some company called Unity that makes the engines games are made from bought the movie special effects studio that made Avatar and LOTR movies.. no way they can't learn how to make better pretty moving pictures for video games/metaverse crap from that. Possibly worth gambling a few dollars on.

Anyone manage to short Sony? Apparently they lost twenty billion in stock value virtually overnight as news broke, someone could have cleaned up on that.

Would you not have had to have been privy to the acquisition to make that kind of move ?

That’s the thing about short selling (which I’ve never done.) - it seems you’d almost have to have some sort of insider trading level knowledge in order to make a move like that, no ? Or are there people that are total snipers on this stuff and the millisecond the Microsoft news hit, they shorted Sony ?

I'm honestly not entirely clear on how close to insider trading doing a short like that would be considered if you'd gotten wind of the deal, as it's more like placing a bet on how you think the market is going to react than buying something you know is about to be worth more. My brain is wired funny, even for an aspie, so my second thought after hearing about this deal was "wow, sucks for Sony, bet their stock is taking a beating", though still too late to do anything with it. Shorts are super risky, limited upside and unlimited downside, but you look like a genius when they work, lol.