Capitalism forces companies to make stupid fucking decisions?!?! shocked Pikachu face
From Bloomberg
“We definitely want to be in the market, and when we can find teams and technology and capability that add to what we’re trying to do in gaming at Microsoft, absolutely we will keep our heads up,” Spencer said. Still, there’s nothing “imminent” and very large deals are probably off the table at present as the company is spending a lot of time absorbing Activision Blizzard employees, he said.
>Acquire studios
>Don’t make any new games
What’s this strategy is called?
Monopoly
Stock market.
Businesses don’t care about their employees beyond their output.
That’s because employees are seen as a liability, while holdings are seen as value.
Basically, employees need to be paid, so having a lot of employees hurts your company value. But owning immaterial things helps company value, because you don’t need to pay for ideas beyond the initial investment.
So headlines like these are common any time a company is looking to boost their stock. Lay off a bunch of employees to reduce cash out, use that freshly gained cash to buy intellectual properties (or buy the companies that own that IP) and then sit on the IP because actually using it would require employees like the ones you just laid off. You don’t care about actually leveraging the IP, because simply owning it is what gives you the value bump. You’re not worried about income from those IPs yet, because you’re just trying to make the company larger with the existing cash you have access to.
They are just buying IP and killing the talent?
I smell microshit and Nokia repeat
Regulators are too busy doing corruption?
I swear they approved these deals subject to conditions.
Things are about to get a whole lot less regulated too. I hope you like poison in your drinking water!
Microsoft sees Sony with many in-house developers who create AAA hype and profit, like Naughty Dog or Guerilla Games, and they want the same. But instead of growing their own teams, like Sony did, they are buying any reasonably sized developer with the hope that the purchase doesn’t affect the final product. Microsoft has been very hands off with the studios that it buys, except Bethesda because Todd needs a babysitter, which reflects this approach of owning but not controlling the studio.
Microsoft doesn’t seem to think that firing the people who make the games we love, like Tango Softworks and Arkane, will cause any harm to their brand because they are the monolith Microsoft.
Regulation? In the US?
Not in this timeline.
surely not in my cuntry, boy
They break the conditions and pay a fine a fraction of the size of the acquisition itself.
Even so any progress the government made is going to evaporate days after the Orange Idiot takes office
I recently found out Nokia required Nokia phones. so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
OOO HYEAH IM ACQUIRINGGGGGGG
Say the line Bart!
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
They unfortunately forgot the second step and went straight the extinguish.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as “embrace, extend, and exterminate”, is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Microsoft sucks but the phrase doesn’t really apply to company acquisitions
I’ll admit I’m using it loosely here because it’s fun
Fair enough, I’m being overly pedantic
The march towards three megacorps running the entire economy continues now that Donnie’s back. It was nice having four years of resistance to unfettered acquisitions.
Can someone help with clarifying a few things?
There is a build up to the full issue, so I’m going to set a few entry questions:
- Are the acquired studios privately owned or in the market, open for hostile takeovers?
My company just did the same thing. Just layed off 15% of staff because of some bad quarters but is now looking into mergers and acquisitions because they think/know the senile microphone abuser will let tech consolidation run wild.
Wait… if corps are people, have they now got anorexia?
Scum. Learn to code, Microsoft.
