It feels the opposite way to me. Microsoft bought a company with an extensive suite of IP that publishes a lot of games. Sony panicked and bought a company that has one franchise (Destiny).
When looking at Disney, I see a company that has bought a lot of deep IP catalogues. They've used that to really propel their future and get high-value talent that wants to work in those universes with a Disney-sized budget to tell their stories.
Activision Blizzard may have cost 20x more, but Activision is really profitable with a P/E ratio of 26 (at the $69B deal price). Microsoft's P/E is 33, Google's is 26, Apple's is 29, Amazon's is 58, and Netflix is 38 (even with the tumble in price). So Microsoft bought Activision relatively cheap compared to its earnings. Bungie is private so we don't really know what their finances are like. Activision's cheap price means that there isn't a lot of risk for Microsoft. Maybe you believe that Activision is about to crater and no one will want their games in the future. It's possible. It's also possible that everyone is going to get tired of the extensive IP catalogues that Disney has assembled. However, when the price is that reasonable, you don't need the same explosive growth to justify the investment.
So Microsoft bought a business that even if it just keeps performing as-usual will be a fine addition to Microsoft. It also has the potential to be huge for Microsoft with a deep IP catalogue, the potential for Xbox exclusives to help launch the next-gen Xbox when the time comes, the potential for cost savings with Azure infrastructure, and probably more that I'm not thinking of.
If Sony buys Bungie and just lets them do their thing, they might get some good games. But it seems like Microsoft wants to buy and pour some money in which seems like a recipe for bigger successes. We've seen it with some of Microsoft's recent purchases. They've poured money into GitHub and made it an even bigger platform. They've poured money into .NET Core and Xamarin/Mono to recapture developer mindshare. It seems like Microsoft is likely to take similar steps with their Activision purchase - and similar steps that Disney has taken with their IP catalogue.
It's possible that the small places Sony has bought have better potential, but Activision Blizard is a profitable company at a relatively cheap price which means that the purchase carries relatively low risk while still offering a lot of upside for Microsoft.
I don't think Sony could afford Activision. Its own market cap is 133b$ USD, which is a lot, but it would still have ended up being a very high-risk buy/merger. I'd be surprised if they ever had any acquisition talks. Activision is so big that only titans like MSFT could afford to buy them outright.
Still, buying a company that's half your size is quite a chunk. And Activision is anything but a save purchase with the recent scandals. I highly doubt Sony would take such a risk.
Honestly, I'm not sure if Activision's IP catalog would attract and retain high-value talent in the same way that Disney's does.
Yes, the catalogue is deep, but much of it consists of dead horses that have been beaten for years or once-great icons that were mismanaged into relative irrelevance.
Budget constraints didn't seem to be what was holding them back before, and I can't see Microsoft suddenly managing the IP any better than Activision were (if anything, I can see it going downhill faster).
I'm honestly really excited about Microsoft using their proven history of remastering games (Halo, AoE) and applying it to that exact list of once-great icons. At this point all they need to do to gain a ton of goodwill is roll WoW into gamepass so it's not yet another subscription and fix the Warcraft remaster.
Those along with not clogging up the candy crush money printer will get them plenty of runway to really dig in and fix the culture.
Yeah I think people overstate the IP of Actiblizz. I get it though, their old games were absolutely amazing and I basically spent my childhood playing those games to death, but modern gaming is so much bigger that the people who look at those old ips fondly are a small minority now, so there isn't really any nostalgia to cash in on. I remember on the news when they did a story on the merger, they called Actiblizz the studio that made Candy Crush. Candy Crush is their most salient IP. Similarly Gen z growing up on games like Fortnite, Roblox or Minecraft, even Actiblizz's Call of Duty, this demographic isn't going to go crazy for the next Starcraft or Warcraft, probably not even Diablo.
It is sort of like if Valve actually made Half Life 3 now, most gamers don't even know what Half Life is, let alone why Half Life 3 would be such a big deal outside of being a meme.
The bigger issue is simply that video games aren't made like movies/television. They're very different.
Video games are very distributed. Its the work of a system of people, from high level concept artists building a shared mindspace for how the game should feel, to writers, to gameplay programmers, low level engine developers making the previously impossible possible, and at the bleeding edge sometimes even hardware engineers. All integral to the process.
Very, very rarely a "10x leader" will emerge from the industry. Someone like Chris Metzen of Blizzard, or Martin O'Donnell of Bungie, or John Carmack, Tim Sweeny, Peter Molyneux (for all his flaws lol) or Todd Howard, Miyamoto, or Kojima.
But its nowhere near the level of impact on the final product that a talented director or writer of a movie can bring to the table. Even as recently as the Bobba Fett series, and Tik Tok blowing up about the two episodes Bryce Dallas Howard directed being significantly better than the rest of the series. That just doesn't happen in games. Games don't "bring in" "guest directors" to... produce... one installment? One segment of the overall game? Its just nonsense. Moreover, every great leader I listed above, eventually, produces something kinda shit. Even the stuff they're known for, oftentimes they'd say that they received far more credit than they deserve; that the team deserves far more than they get.
The broader conclusion being: it takes some literal magic to produce great games. Ask anyone in the industry and they'll all agree: its a miracle games ever ship, let alone that some stand among the highest tier of art humanity has ever made. You can't just buy cool IP, like a sugar trap to attract talent like they're flies. On the contrary, the one model which does seem to work, is the literal antithesis of the Disney model: teams which work together for abnormally long periods of time (5+ years) trend toward producing fantastic stuff, eventually.
Though to be clear: there's something about that "Disney of Games" idea that I find fascinating as an explanation for Microsoft's behavior. And while I disagree with the assertion that it will work, I can't disagree with the guess that its a model Xbox has used, internally, to talk about their growing portfolio.
I think there's a misunderstanding of my comment; I am not asserting that the AB purchase was bad for Microsoft. Just that this Sony/Bungie purchase will be better for Sony than AB will be for Microsoft. Both platforms will see success with their recent acquisitions.
One thing I'd add, in short: Its easier to 10x a small company than a large company. Applied here; Destiny is a fantastic launchpad, but many in the community would agree that its potential was always short of being fully realized. With additional funding, talent, and leadership; its reasonable to conclude that PlayStation could be a very positive force on the game (for everyone who isn't an Xbox gamer, of course, sadly). There's a lot of room to improve this product, which is already relatively good; many untapped players.
In comparison, AB is something of a... well, I don't want to say "disaster", because there are some great parts to that company, but they're having major issues. Even putting the sexual assault scandal aside: There's much less of a launchpad for Xbox to start from and add value. We're talking ten thousand employees, across dozens of product lines, and maybe three of them have a strong future outlook. They're looking at a years-long phase of cleaning shop, reorganizing, firing, hiring, planning new projects, cancelling bad ones, it's going to be dirty, and in none of that is "releasing awesome games to players". But, maybe there's a light at the end; I really, really hope so, and believe there will be.
And all of this is if the acquisition goes through. There's a real possibility it'll be shut down. Sony "sneaking in" this much smaller Bungie acquisition at the same time basically guarantees it'll go through; the USG/EU won't block both. And frankly, I don't believe they'll block either, but its still a possibility.
> Sony panicked and bought a company that has one franchise (Destiny).
Beyond the fact that this has supposedly been in the works for months, so not exactly a panic, Bungie has a new IP in development, and has announced their plan to expand Destiny beyond video games, to movies, books, and other media. So while you're right in the sense that today, Bungie only has Destiny, they've already been working on making that not true, even if they're not there just yet.
They also get neat tech with the purchase - the blizzard launcher is awesome. As far as smooth downloads/deployments/go-lives are concerned that launcher and the games its services are in leagues of their own, so far beyond Microsofts own store it's not even funny (ignoring the recent problem of Diablo 2 running twenty year old net code causing problems with its recent launch).
Additionally, most of the arguments about AB dying in the near future have little to do wiht the thing that MS actually bought, which is IP, and everything to do with how AB as a company has handled that IP. If you think Microsoft is better at not mis-handling IP than Activision-Blizzard is, then you should assume that the acquisition of that intellectual property at the market price of the company (which as you mention was not a highly speculative thing), is a very good deal for Microsoft.
That said, I've never played the Microsoft version of Minecraft because it seems strictly worse, and also unmoddable.
When looking at Disney, I see a company that has bought a lot of deep IP catalogues. They've used that to really propel their future and get high-value talent that wants to work in those universes with a Disney-sized budget to tell their stories.
Activision Blizzard may have cost 20x more, but Activision is really profitable with a P/E ratio of 26 (at the $69B deal price). Microsoft's P/E is 33, Google's is 26, Apple's is 29, Amazon's is 58, and Netflix is 38 (even with the tumble in price). So Microsoft bought Activision relatively cheap compared to its earnings. Bungie is private so we don't really know what their finances are like. Activision's cheap price means that there isn't a lot of risk for Microsoft. Maybe you believe that Activision is about to crater and no one will want their games in the future. It's possible. It's also possible that everyone is going to get tired of the extensive IP catalogues that Disney has assembled. However, when the price is that reasonable, you don't need the same explosive growth to justify the investment.
So Microsoft bought a business that even if it just keeps performing as-usual will be a fine addition to Microsoft. It also has the potential to be huge for Microsoft with a deep IP catalogue, the potential for Xbox exclusives to help launch the next-gen Xbox when the time comes, the potential for cost savings with Azure infrastructure, and probably more that I'm not thinking of.
If Sony buys Bungie and just lets them do their thing, they might get some good games. But it seems like Microsoft wants to buy and pour some money in which seems like a recipe for bigger successes. We've seen it with some of Microsoft's recent purchases. They've poured money into GitHub and made it an even bigger platform. They've poured money into .NET Core and Xamarin/Mono to recapture developer mindshare. It seems like Microsoft is likely to take similar steps with their Activision purchase - and similar steps that Disney has taken with their IP catalogue.
It's possible that the small places Sony has bought have better potential, but Activision Blizard is a profitable company at a relatively cheap price which means that the purchase carries relatively low risk while still offering a lot of upside for Microsoft.