FTC says it will appeal to block Microsoft-Activision deal

I know this mantra and I agree for most utilities and consumer goods.

But Activision is barely functional anymore. We don’t tend to look ahead, but Activision’s pipeline is all dried up. They’ve driven a lot of their cash cows into the ground or fell out of the zeitgeist, like Tony Hawk’s, Crash Bandicoot (yeah, some 30- to 40-somethings may have fond memories, but the series has no pull factor anymore like Mario and even Sonic still do), Spyro (same thing) and Guitar Hero. Movie adaptations have fallen out of style, which have been most of Activision’s output in the 2000s and the movie-adjacent IPs, that are still pulling numbers like Spider-Man aren’t licensed to them anymore.

Blizzard has more or less (paradoxically more and less) the same problem: Yes, they are currently remembered for their Diablo 4 launch and lauded again as if they could never do anything wrong, but their last two games in the 2020s have been Overwatch 2 and Diablo Immortal. Before that Overwatch in 2016. There is just not a Diablo 5 in the books for the next few years. RTS have always been niche, but considerably less so in the eras of Age of Empire and Command & Conquer, when StarCraft and WarCraft have been major hits. I don’t know if a StarCraft III would bring in billions. WoW is an entirely different beast, which fails to acquire a younger audience, while comparable phenomena like Fortnite don’t really struggle with this. WoW and Classic are bankable money hoses, but they are not getting bigger.

Even King has kind of run its course: Sure you have heard of Candy Crush, but its time has passed the moment smartphones became good enough for Fortnite (again). I just don’t see school kids in 2030 playing Candy Crush 2, while I can imagine they are still playing Fortnite. The same goes for Angry Birds. King failed to adapt to the new age after smartphones moved beyond the iPod-touch-era.

ABK has 17K employees and USD 7 billion of revenue, which sounds impressive, until you look into their annual report: nearly half their revenue comes from mobile vs. consoles and PC and it is the only segment not shrinking. According to their last annual, mainly due to the contributions of Diablo Immortal next to the shrinking King-franchises. More than 75% of ABK’s revenue are in-game purchases and subscriptions, which leaves less than 25% for game sales. Additionally Vanguard is credited multiple times in the report as selling so bad it ripped a hole in Activision’s 2022 financial year.

All in all I feel like Activision is the CoD-machine first and lives off of the last people still playing WoW and - more importantly - still playing Candy Crush. With the only exception of CoD (Warzone) they have difficulties acquiring a new audience and are visibly not growing any more. A streak of badly received CoDs can tank their company.

I still remember the heydays of both Blizzard and Activision and have fond memories of a lot of their franchises, but these times are gone and an acquisition now when the times are okay (Diablo 4, CoD MW2 selling much better than Vanguard) is much more sensible, than a sell off in a few years, when Candy Crush dries up and the then-current CoD sucks.