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 Bloomberg posted:Activision will pay $18 a share in cash, a 16 percent premium to King Digital’s closing price of $15.54 Monday in New York. The boards of both companies have approved the transaction, Santa Monica, California-based Activision said Monday in a statement. The people behind Call of Duty, Destiny, Diablo, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, WarCraft, World of WarCraft, StarCraft have acquired the company behind the mobile success Candy Crush. At a time where everyone is trying to figure out which business model to use for games, and companies like Blizzard are experimenting with Free To Play (F2P), this is going to be particularly interesting. I hate Destiny’s business model, and I think the prices in Heroes of the Storm are waaay too high, and I’m anxious to see what Blizzard will do with Overwatch, to say the least. And we all know how the Real Money Auction House in Diablo 3 ended up. Overwatch is moving closer to a F2P model, but it could also mean an expansion into mobile for Activision Blizzard. Time will tell. 
ufarn fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Nov 3, 2015 |
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Nov 3, 2015 09:40
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At first I thought the last character in the thread title was a zero and thought, "Yeah, those guys are worthless," despite knowing that this was only true from a moral standpoint. Or course it was a B. Ha ha the freemium model is a cancer that's threatening to envelop video gaming oh god please kill me
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Nov 3, 2015 09:45
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I also recommend following @Steam_Spy on Twitter, as he datamines places like Steam and Twitch to gauge videogame popularity and sales; it’s looking pretty bad in the industry right now as the indie goldrush subsides:
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Nov 3, 2015 09:55
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ufarn posted:I also recommend following @Steam_Spy on Twitter, as he datamines places like Steam and Twitch to gauge videogame popularity and sales; it’s looking pretty bad in the industry right now as the indie goldrush subsides: Because Greenlight does.. what exactly to people's buying behaviour? Looks like a case of of correlation != causation, median sales were decreasing already for almost a year.
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Nov 3, 2015 10:05
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mike12345 posted:Because Greenlight does.. what exactly to people's buying behaviour? Looks like a case of of correlation != causation, median sales were decreasing already for almost a year.
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Nov 3, 2015 10:37
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Also a lot of Greenlight and post-Greenlight games are poo poo, but basically yeah.
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Nov 3, 2015 10:37
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giving people more choice can lead to less things sold overall, even if it's lots of good stuff, it's a pretty well understood psychological trait the greenlight floodgates just made it harder to know what the gently caress to buy, I know I buy less steam games overall now
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Nov 3, 2015 10:44
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I buy less for PC/Steam as well, and the stuff I buy, I never end up playing. Same goes for the free PS+ games. I’ll probably only be playing Souls/Bloodborne games and Uncharted 4 multiplayer for the foreseeable future. Overwatch looks fantastic, even with my crappy PC, but Blizzard are still looking into ways to mess up the game, and they clearly didn’t think skins were sufficient as a business model for Heroes of the Storm, so I’m a bit worried for the direction of Overwatch. They apparently didn’t go the DOTA 2 route. I hope we get an Overwatch with a fixed price with some additional upsale on top of it with skins and costumes - presumably on top of a Collector’s Edition with all the crap that entails. I am probably going to be the kind of weirdo who watches people play games more than I play myself. There are some pretty good streamers on Twitch, and they have the subscribers and money to play dozens of games a month that they never pick up again. ufarn fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Nov 3, 2015 |
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Nov 3, 2015 11:01
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cat doter posted:giving people more choice can lead to less things sold overall, even if it's lots of good stuff, it's a pretty well understood psychological trait I say thank god, because I was actually having a problem for a while there. Greenlight kinda cured me of that "must buy" frenzy. Most games might be poo poo, but at least I can finally afford a car.
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Nov 3, 2015 12:15
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OP, to give people perspective you should add that Disney paid $1.9bil less to acquire Star Wars.
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Nov 3, 2015 12:19
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cat doter posted:giving people more choice can lead to less things sold overall, even if it's lots of good stuff, it's a pretty well understood psychological trait Thats why I like Aldi/Lidl. You want beans? Great we have can of beans. Not 50 different brands of artisan beans to agonize over, just beans. Buy these beans and shut the gently caress up.
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Nov 3, 2015 12:23
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Phrosphor posted:OP, to give people perspective you should add that Disney paid $1.9bil less to acquire Star Wars.
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Nov 3, 2015 12:49
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Phrosphor posted:OP, to give people perspective you should add that Disney paid $1.9bil less to acquire Star Wars. This is an apples to oranges comparison. Disney had to further invest in their newly acquired property to make it competitive again. King is already a market leader in a strategically valuable and growing market. Furthermore, George Lucas maintained ownership of LucasFilms' facilities after the deal. Disney leases LucasFilm's real estate from George Lucas even after acquiring his company. I think this is a very good acquisition for the Acti-Blizzard. Outside of Hearthstone, it really plugs in the gaps in Acti-Blizzard's catalog and rectifies its glaring strategic weakness in mobile. According to their presentation, their catalog is now evenly split between console, PC/Online, and mobile. This gets them a foothold in mobile and allows them to cross promote their console/PC brands. More importantly, they now have access to King's institutional knowledge about the mobile market. King has proven itself to a reliable hitmaker with the release Pet Heroes and Bubble Witch rather than one-trick pony centered on Candy Crush Saga. They're very productive and have maintained some hit titles for as long as three years. The important takeaway is that this acquisition is more about users and King's market data than is about King's properties. King has over 300 million unique monthly users engaging in their catalog. Was is it worth paying a 17%~ premium? Well, Acti-Blizzard is a cash rich company and an acquisition is less costly than spending five years building up their brand/know-how after being late to the mobile gaming party. They really shouldn't have found themselves in a position where they had to make such a large acquisition. Then again, they probably wouldn't have been able to make this acquisition is they were still under VIvendi. I should also note that this acquisition is still pending approval from the Irish government before it can be completed in Spring 2016.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:08
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Sunning posted:King has proven itself to a reliable hitmaker with the release Pet Heroes and Bubble Witch rather than one-trick pony centered on Candy Crush Saga. They're very productive and have maintained some hit titles for as long as three years. The important takeaway is that this acquisition is more about users and King's market data than is about King's properties. King has over 300 million unique monthly users engaging in their catalog. Yeah, I guess this is the big difference between them and someone like Rovio who Activision had actually partnered with before to bring Angry Birds to consoles and you'd have thought like, wouldn't that have been a better match for them? But then you see how aside from anything with Angry Birds in the title, their other original properties haven't taken off to any relative success in the past few years.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:13
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Stop giving Activision money for their poo poo games.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:15
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Activision are the masters of buying things just after they've obviously peaked. Good luck to them, though!
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Nov 3, 2015 16:16
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Viewtiful Jew posted:Yeah, I guess this is the big difference between them and someone like Rovio who Activision had actually partnered with before to bring Angry Birds to consoles and you'd have thought like, wouldn't that have been a better match for them? But then you see how aside from anything with Angry Birds in the title, their other original properties haven't taken off to any relative success in the past few years. Rovio has seen much better days. Much of the company's growth was centered around merchandising for Angry Birds rather than diversifying their catalog of games. They focused on re-skinning Angry Birds for new apps, merchandising, and trans-media products (movies, TV shows, etc.). When Angry Birds declined, the whole foundation for the company collapsed. Furthermore, Rovio struggled to transition into the F2P model that dominated the mobile market. Angry Birds was initially a paid app that only offered F2P versions in early 2014 since paid app revenue heavily declined. By then, the landscape of the mobile market had changed dramatically. Rovio found itself going up against wealthy competitors who had a better knowledge of the F2P mobile market than they did. They only thing they have going for them is their licensing deals but even that is drying up.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:35
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it's so nice that all the scummy companies are merging into one. very convenient as a consumer
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Nov 3, 2015 16:47
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I thought that King was having financial issues because literally everything besides candy crush flopped. I guess they've done better since I last read about their company at least a year ago. I'm no big city video game buisinessman, but I'd assume putting 5 billion into Blizzard, a company that still has quite a bit of good will and is profitable as gently caress would have been a better move.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:53
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Steam just rolled out their Item Store, which is essentially a third-party in-app store. The first game to support it is Rust. Welcome to F2P on Steam.
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Nov 4, 2015 18:14
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will the ceo of candy crush sit around and make lots of twitter posts about how sad he is now that he's a billionaire
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Nov 4, 2015 19:08
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Endorph posted:will the ceo of candy crush sit around and make lots of twitter posts about how sad he is now that he's a billionaire Nah because Notch actually hoped/believed that if he legally wasn't the brains behind Minecraft anymore that he could just go back to being one of the indies and be chill again. Y'know show up at a Game Jam and it'd be like Minecraft never happened and things would be back to how to they were in 2008/2009.
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Nov 4, 2015 19:13
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Viewtiful Jew posted:Nah because Notch actually hoped/believed that if he legally wasn't the brains behind Minecraft anymore that he could just go back to being one of the indies and be chill again. Y'know show up at a Game Jam and it'd be like Minecraft never happened and things would be back to how to they were in 2008/2009.
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Nov 4, 2015 19:15
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Maker of games I don't care about buys maker of other game I don't care about. Big development!
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Nov 4, 2015 19:24
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Saw a thing yesterday that Actvision basically did this to save 1 billion in taxes cuz they had so much money overseas lol
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Nov 4, 2015 19:26
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mike12345 posted:Because Greenlight does.. what exactly to people's buying behaviour? Looks like a case of of correlation != causation, median sales were decreasing already for almost a year. Would this also relate to a plethora of alternative store (humble bundle store, green man gaming, etc) increasing in popularity too? Not really sure what we're supposed to glean from that data.
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Nov 4, 2015 19:30
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The REAL Goobusters posted:Saw a thing yesterday that Actvision basically did this to save 1 billion in taxes cuz they had so much money overseas lol Granted, companies do tend to make some weirder acquisition with overseas money. Not that King is necessarily a bad investment.
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Nov 4, 2015 19:31
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all i know is that i would have liked to be there for the talks between bobby "soak them for every loving penny you can" kotick and the guys who tried to trademark the words "candy" and "saga"
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Nov 6, 2015 07:39
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Proteus4994 posted:all i know is that i would have liked to be there for the talks between bobby "soak them for every loving penny you can" kotick and the guys who tried to trademark the words "candy" and "saga" and then retroactively (and successfully) sued OLDER games released with Candy or Saga in the title for copyright infringement. the best part is that they weren't going to win the case because some guy made a game called Candy Smash years before Candy Saga so therefore they can't claim original creation, so they fuckin' just went and bought an even older company who released a game called Candy... something. and said: "see, we came up with it first". and won lolllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
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Nov 6, 2015 22:33
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