Krafton Union (owners of Bluehole/PUBG Corp), Smilegate, NcSoft, Daybreak, Gamigo, Studio Wildcard and Innersloth all seem possible for Tencent. They make the games Tencent likes…
If I was MS and Tencent comes sniffing around Wildcard I’d buy them. Ark is a valuable IP and they could benefit from proximity to MS.
Smells like Bungie or Bluehole/Krafton (PUBG).
The good thing is that Tencent seems to be interested in companies I have no interest. And even if they somehow acquire one of the big guns, at least they are not platform holders
I agree. The pattern of acquisition are F2P game studios with heavy MTX. But they like to invest in all kinds of companies and acquired leyou not to long ago which are not just F2P game studios.
2 third person action/adventure with a strong narrative seems like a good metric. These games have to start rating high too.
The higher rating needs more soft power influence. There was some stupid games site that rated Forza Horizon 2/10.
Looking at comments on twitter/Reddit the speculation are on NCsoft and Zynga.
they are also setting up big AAA studios in the west dedicated to make these blockbuster games, and have been hiring big talent from studios like Capcom, Rockstar, so on. I’m gonna bet they’re gonna be the next big publisher.
They are actively doing that now. The key to all of this is Matt Booty bringing them closer, so that help is available anytime among each other. All the studio heads connect in “summits”, and this goes for all the other functional heads belonging to divisions such as Animation, Graphics Tech, Level Designers, Writers etc.
This has been proactively mentioned by Matt (to IGN), but the Gaming press ignores such things. Since, 2020 they have started taking Xbox seriously, and every interview is being noted.
And its about time
This MS won’t acquire a publisher talk is nonsense. Is there a guarantee that they will? Of course not. But the number of employees is irrelevant. Much like the Bethesda deal the company would continue to operate as its own business under the MS umbrella.
It is possible to bring smaller studios into Xbox Game Studios and acquire companies like Bethesda that continue their day to do day operations as a cohesive unit.
This isnt an argument in support of or indicating that I think they will. Just that saying they won’t, or would just let Amazon or Google buy them, is nonsense. They have a lot more riding on this currently than Amazon or Google. Stadia and Luna are pet projects right now. MS has a whole pillar of its business at stake. They will do what they have to.
As it worries Microsoft,they saw this coming and all their aquisitions were in anticipation of this.
Indeed. If Google and Amazon are in the mix they have no choice but to bump back. Employee count be damned. This is the Netflix of gaming at stake.
What would you spend?
12 AAA is too much! To retain the significance of AAA quality title, it is also important to space them out and give them the breathing space and PR attention they need. 4-6 is good number with the in-between months being filled up with 3rd party exclusive content (AAA or AA).
Agreed. There isn’t a publisher out there that produces 12 AAA titles a year. Expecting anything more than 4-6AAA first party titles in unrealistic. They might very well release 12 games a year but the majority of them won’t be AAA and there is no shame in that.
They grew to 15M from 10M primarily because of increased awareness and FlightSim publicity. Expect more growth, once they start targeting the mobile only crowd.
I’d love Xbox to target countries like Korea, India, China and Indonesia more. Asian countries are not alike and not everyone likes JRPGs in Asia. I’ve seen Americans/Europeans like jrpgs more.
However, if you localize existing AAA titles in, say, Mandarin, Hindi+4 other Indian languages, Bahasa, Malay, Russian and Swahili – you will get a spurt in subscriptions that is unheard of in the gaming community.
Asians who belong to China, India, and Indonesia would be chuckling when 100M is considered a large number.
Damn…
F
The biggest acquisition has been 7.5 billion for a whole publisher. Aside from that Ubisoft, Take Two and EA valuation is way above that and I dont think any of those will sell themselves since they make a lot of money off all of them.
If Stadia and Luna are pet projects I would not expect them to be spending $20+ billion acquiring publishers. If they aren’t doing it, then there isn’t much reason for Microsoft to do it either.
I’m not saying that stuff like Capcom is off the table, I just think the people listing stuff like EA and Take Two are off base. I personally expect that Bethesda is on the higher end of the acquisitions that will get done.
There’s plenty of genres. They’re planning on gamepass being a service for hundreds of millions. Just because there’s a dozen doesn’t mean they’ll all interest you.
The biggest gaming acquisition was actually Tencent buying Supercell for $8.6 Billion in 2016
The part of the equation is that is being overlooked is that 20 billion dollars is essentially pocket change to any of these companies. If they try and fail they write it off. If Google buys a company for 20 billion and it fails, there is 0% chance it affects the company as a whole. You have to realize that these companies are leveraging existing infrastructure. The risk is minimal.
Shit, look at MS. They paid as much as they did for Bethesda for those Nokia assets and were like “LOL whoops, well, anyway” tosses it in the trash
Or skype for 8.5 billion.
And just for a frame of reference, MS market cap has gone up over 100 billion this week. Their value shifted just a tad under EA, Ubisoft, Take Two, and Activision’s marketcaps combined in a couple days,.