Activision Blizzard buys independence from Vivendi. "costs $8.2 billion."

[eFKac]

zarx said:

eFKac said:
I wonder whether they will change some of their developing and publishing practices and characteristics now.

Why would they? They are the most profitable publically traded gaming company. If anything they will be more conseThat's because they don't have $4b in cash anymore.

More conservative is also a change isn't it? I've never crossed out that possibility but of course the opposite would be more spectacular.

I particularly wonder what they how can they react if CoD doesn't live up to the previous installments. Ghosts' pre orders when we go by VGC numbers aren't extremely encouraging, they are laging behind in the same time frame, there may be a bit of fatigue since it looks again more of the same. Also generational transition may be hard, there tend to be new trends with the start of the generation.

Also Destiny is a huge is a huge project, that I think isn't getting as much hype as they would want. Titanfall seems to be getting shit ton of hype both from gamers and critiques and I believe those games will be in big competition with each other.

DOTA2 will probably be very successful, maybe Activision part will try going for the F2P market.

Will they still go for the big AAA budget business model with a lot DLC, or introduce microtransactions. What will they implement in Destiny, since it's supposed to be a game for years. What will the WoW successor business model be, will they change the subscriptions to something else?

And lastly will they drop those shovelware franchises and stick to the big names since they don't have that much spare money? That seems plausible, but maybe they will try some diversity in case more CoD will not prove to the answer. And will they try to reboot some of the franchises that they took to the ground like Crash, Tony Hawk and so on.

A lot of interesting stuff to be determined here, but yeah overall I rather expect them to stay conservative in both games development and business model for better or worse.