I wonder if this becomes a big in for Microsoft in South Korea. It seems Blizzard is still huge over there anyways. I hadn't even really thought of it at first, but South Korea is like this giant market, it seems to be where companies like Tencent are making their money. It's like one day you'll hear about something like Dungeon Fighter Online and it's like: Oh what's that...oh, it's the biggest money making game in the whole world right now, OK. While there's definitely a whole lot of fucking money to be made here with Blizzard games and Call of Duty, I wonder if getting Blizzard is part of a strategy to really make some cash in Korea.
Was looking at the Call of Duty studios, or at least the ones I could remember. It'd not realized ol' Visceral Sledgehammer Games wasn't a main CoD studio anymore. So here's the studios that make CoD, and it seems sometimes they've got four of them on one: Infinity Ward which had Neversoft merged into it, Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games, Raven Software, Hight Moon Studios, Toys for Bob, and Beenox. I'm going to guess most of these studios (at least Sledgehammer Games, Raven Software, Hight Moon Studios, and Toys for Bob) aren't doing Call of Duty games every year, or maybe even ever again, after this. If your model is Call of Duty for Xbox Game Pass you kind of don't need a new one every year. And you definitely don't need a new one every year when you're also publishing all the other major first person shooters. But you do need content to flesh out your Xbox Game Pass, so maybe, hopefully, they've got those other guys going back to what they were doing before.
Also this merger has to be the end of Activision. I mean, I don't think there's any developers that develop under the name Activision. Activision is just the overall company name they publish under. Well, there's not exactly any good will with that name, and there's no point in Microsoft publishing a select few titles under a Activison brand, so I guess once this merger is final next year that's the end of Activision.
Would also be interesting to see what happens to Vicarious Visions; they seemed to just be coming into their own recently, but were merged into a Blizzard support role like Activision does with all those CoD guys.
It's kind of funny how Microsoft now basically owns every major PC property of the '90s. It's like you thought they forgot about them when they started up Xbox and then kind of all at once 20 years later they bought them all up in a couple fell swoops.
I do wonder though how many of these properties will just go unused by them. Microsoft is the studio that owns MechWarrior and Shadowrun and they personally do almost nothing with either. Then again they now own a whole fucking lot of studios to do stuff will.
