MONEY FOR NOTHING
Microsoft is about to learn that some things simply can’t be bought, no matter how much money you have to burn...
The Microsoft takeover of Activision Blizzard – a gaming buyout on an unprecedented scale. A deal worth almost 70 billion US dollars, or around 100 billion Dollarydoos. The world of gaming is still reeling from the shock. What does this all mean? How will it affect our lives? Will Bill Gates ruin gaming the same way he ruined television, by always appearing in grotesque gut-hugging pink jumpers? The answer is: don’t panic. This isn’t the end of gaming. This simply marks the end of Activision Blizzard as a cultural force.
Consider the recent Disney buyouts of Marvel and Lucasfilm. At the time, this seemed like a big deal. The characters Disney bought are household names, forming pop-culture pantheons built up over half a century of creative output. But when the Mouse cut his cheques, they were cultural properties in sharp decline.
American comic books have been dropping off steadily since at least the early 1970s. The occasional emergence of an Alan Moore or a Grant Morrison has not altered this trajectory. Comic sales have been in freefall for years – the hit manga Demon Slayer now outsells all American comics put together!
Likewise, since the very first sequel arrived in 1980, all Star Wars content has been little more than fan fiction. When the Disney Star Wars movies entered mass production their execrable nature so confused fans that some of them broke completely from reality. Many otherwise welladjusted and sane people convinced themselves that Episode VIII wasn’t actually a bad movie, you just need to watch it four or five times for the true genius of it to sink in.
Attendance at the ‘Galaxy’s Edge’ Star Wars theme parks is well below initial projections. The toys just don’t sell anymore. A dozen or so Star Wars TV shows are in development for Disney+, and no-one cares. Ours is an attention economy, and Disney spent billions on IPs that people can’t even be bothered pirating. Disney Star Wars movies somehow achieved the impossible: they made the prequels look good!
Has Microsoft followed in the Mouse’s footsteps and bought a multi-billion-dollar lemon? Let us consider the franchises Mr. Satya Nadella now has at his fingertips.
There’s World of Warcraft, of course, the subscription-based online game full of sexy goblins in gigantic shoulder-pads. WoW has been haemorrhaging players for years; Blizzard stopped publicising their subscriber count some time ago. The recent announcement that Horde and Alliance players could go questing together was undoubtedly necessitated by the dwindling player pool.
For the record, I’d like to stress that we’re not haters here at PC PowerPlay. If you like games filled with muscular goblin ladies, then more power to you. It’s just that Blizzard’s offerings no longer represent the state of the art in this department – the ‘boomer shooter’ Hedon is currently the market leader in greenskin cheesecake.
Back on topic: the last Call of Duty was a joke, Overwatch is as dead as a doornail, Diablo Immortal is an embarrassment, and Candy Crush isn’t so much a game as a digital barbiturate. Activision Blizzard still makes headlines, but for all the wrong reasons – like employees allegedly having their breast milk stolen from the company fridge.
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick will personally earn around four hundred million dollars from the buyout deal, more than any human being could ever need, unless he wants to run for office. Would he be any worse than the current resident of the White House? Perhaps President Kotick could avert future wars not by invading countries, but by simply buying them...
To the low-information gamer, Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard might seem like a hundred billion dollars well spent. But this isn’t the Activision that David Crane founded to champion the rights of game designers. This isn’t the Blizzard that made The Lost Vikings and Warcraft III. The well-informed gamer – the sophisticated reader of PCPP – knows that today’s Activision Blizzard is just an IP lich; a skeleton of dead brands held together by dark magic and spite.
The two stand-out games of 2021 were Highfleet and Cruelty Squad, each crafted by a lone, eccentric, dedicated designer driven by an uncompromising vision. And they’re not alone: making everything from Doom .wads to wireframe flight sims, there is a new wave of lone game devs doing something that the big end of town has forgotten how to do: capture the imagination.
The death of Activision Blizzard will mark the rebirth of gaming – just you wait!