Well, there go our remaining hopes of things going back to normal in 2022. In dollar terms, game-industry acquisitions in January alone surpassed the estimated total for the whole of 2021. If you were worried about the industry’s direction of travel when Take-Two announced the $12.7bn buyout of mobile titan Zynga, you needn’t have been: within days, Microsoft dragged us into a different dimension altogether. Such was the extent to which the $68.7bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard upended the industry that Sony buying Bungie for $3.6bn a fortnight later felt oddly smalltime: yes, very good, but did you not get the memo? We dream bigger in 2022.
Still, once the initial nausea had passed, it was impossible not to consider the beleaguered development teams at Activision Blizzard. Alongside the newly minted shareholders, they are the principal beneficiaries of all this. Clearly it has not been easy working under the cloud of a misconduct scandal that, for all its reverberations around the industry, had the biggest impact upon those who were closest to it, and still had jobs to do.
have loudened in the intervening months, and a buyout in theory represents the quickest and cleanest transformation of Activision Blizzard that anyone could reasonably have hoped for. Current CEO Bobby Kotick will be gone once the ink dries, presumably to be followed by the
