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Blizzard Breaks For Independence As Kotick Plans $8.2 Billion Dollar Buyout
MojoKid writes "The CEO of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, announced this morning that he would lead an investor buyout of the company worth approximately $8.2 billion dollars. The move would free Blactivision (how has this moniker never caught on?) to become an independent publisher and free it from the clutches of Vivendi, the evil French entertainment conglomerate. Vivendi has reportedly been attempting to sell Activision Blizzard for years, due to an apparent hatred of actually turning a profit, given than the game developer owns some of the most popular franchises on Earth. Kotick has previously been known for his comments regarding exploiting game franchises and for gems like this: 'We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.'"
Blactivision (how has this moniker never caught on?)
Because it's fucking stupid. It's fupid.
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That exceeded the standard threshold for painfully aspergian jokes and obnoxious editorializing in an article write-up.
You have one job, Unkown Lamer, one job!
I've been involved with Blizzard since the early days when they weren't so popular despite being so young. Before WoW, before Warcraft 3. I'm sure there were many people who can go back further, but ever since Starcraft, I've been more than a hardcore fan: I've been a modder. I've probably spent more time on b.net than a person does sleeping in the same time period.
It kills me to say this, but Blizzard took a turn for the worst ever since Activision acquired them. And oh yeah, that's the problem: Blizzard turns a profit and that's all they seem to care about these days: monetizing and milking the hell out of their franchises. At the expense of the games they're producing. It's a business strategy of money now and let's not worry about the later.
Well now later has come, and Diablo 3 is complete and utter crap, Starcraft 2 is borderline crap, WoW has turned into little more than a glorified cash cow, and their new big thing was a trading card game (whoo?). They were riding on their popularity and fan base, but now it's just... Ugh. They've shifted over the pro gaming scene, but us modders and level designers have been left in the dark (once again).
Not only is their EULA damn near totalitarian (they own everything you make with your editor, including characters, plots, etc... At least that's what it says), but the editor is a pile of crap that seems to have been coded by interns.
As for the actual game itself. Well, it's about three years old at this point and with a GTX Titan and a 4770K Haswell processor you'll still only be pulling around 30-40 FPS with max settings (1280x720, no AA/AS). That's freaking ridiculous and shows just how badly coded the game is.
I'm moving onto bigger and better things. This French company is quite smart to get rid of the sinking ship.
Call me when Blizzard breaks free of Kotick/Activision and actually starts making good games again.
I think that the move to buyout the company also has do with Vivendi trying to force Activision to issue a $3 Billion dividend. Vivendi is a majority owner of Activision. Vivendi will get $2 Billion out of the deal, and if it works well enough, may force additional dividends in the future until Activision is rung dry and some or all of Vivendi's enormous debt is paid down. The buyout is a matter of survival for Activision.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/22/vivendi-activision-idUSL6N0FS0OQ20130722
The two go hand in hand. I've worked in a couple game development houses, and found that the good games we released were all titles we had fun making. Of course, there were fun games to make that we were flops as well, but literally every game that wasn't fun to make, indeed, felt like work to make, felt like work to play.
A fun game will always be fun to make. If your dev teams ever, EVER reach the point of, "Fuck this shit, I hate my job, kill me now," I promise you the game will be utter garbage.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Seconded. I was hoping Blizzard was going to dump Activision and go back to developing new IP instead of rehashing the same 3 ideas over and over again.
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WOW may be losing subscribers, but it's still insanely profitable.
I wonder what's leading them to lose subscribers. If it's just fatigue, since the game is so old. One pattern I've noticed is as they've shortened the timeline between patches and expansions, players seem to quit more often. Once and expansion is announced, in game players (and I would assume subscriptions) drop. It seems like now it even happens in between patches. I assume it is because players feel whatever they earn will be worth less by the new patch/expansion. I wonder sometimes if they wouldn't be better served by not announcing patches so early, and having longer cycles between expansions.
Apparently we're getting the TL;DR of the TL;DR. The real truth is this:
Following the close of these two transactions, Vivendi will retain about 12% of Activision Blizzard and will no longer be the majority shareholder. [http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2013/07/26/activision-buys-majority-vivendi-stock/2588675/]
This is only a partial buy-out. While they would lose the majority reign over A/B, they'd still have a 12% say in everything they do.
What Diablo III? There were only two games released in that series, though I really wish they'd make a third sometime.
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