ATVI Lost 48% Of Its Value From October 1 to December 24 ATVI went from $83.38 to $43.39. So ATVI lost 48% of its value. It is not as bad as it looks though. People are taking their money out of NASDAQ and tech stocks in general. NASDAQ lost 22% of its value from early October to late December. Alas, 48% is a lot bigger than 22%. Looking elsewhere, EA lost 50% of its value over six months from late July to late December. Ubisoft lost 34% of its value over three months. Take Two Interactive lost 28% of its value over three months. Nintendo lost 44% over nine months in 2018. That said, no major games industry stock has fallen as quickly and as much as ATVI.
Blizzard Active Player Base Declined By 20% ATVI measures "Monthly Active Users" and reveals those totals during investor calls. During Q2 of 2017 Blizzard had 46 million MAUs. in Q2 of 2018 Blizzard was down to 37 million. Blizzard has lost 20% of its MAUs. That # remained steady at 37 million in Q3 of 2018. During Q3 of 2018 the WoW expansion sold 3.4 million on release day. With no big new game release in Q4 of 2018 look for MAUs to decline below 37 million. Blizzard recently paid 100 customer service people to end their employment. Blizzard claimed they could still give very good customer service. Well, from a macro perspective if you've gone from 46 million to 37 million active users you do not need as many customer service personnel. So Blizzard's promise of continued high quality customer service seems reasonable.
Blizzard Revenue Is Up So Far In 2018 Blizzard revenue in 2017 was 1.538 Billion after 3 quarters. While in 2018 revenue is 1.604 Billion through 3 quarters of the year. So its not all gloom and doom at Blizzard. Revenue is up ~5%. They are managing to get more money from fewer active users. Blizzard's segment operating income ( profit ) was 0.589 Billion in 2017 and it fell to 0.444 Billion through 3 quarters in 2018. Profit is down 20% in 2018.. ouch. That is rough. Increased revenues along with lower profits seem congruent with the leaks going to the media that Blizzard is trying to cut expenses. Its important to keep in mind that they still made $444 million profit in the last nine months and they still have a player base of 37 million. Does Canada even have population of 37 million? Despite some negative mainstream press and a lot of "piling on" by youtuber news channels Blizzard ain't going under any time soon.
Solid Leadership Provides Reason For Optimism
Allen Adham Mike Morhaime left and that sucks man. It hurts. Morhaime made it clear he loved SC2 and loved RTS games. However, Allen Adham was the leader of Blizzard when WoW, Diablo2, and Brood War were made. Adham was part of building the teams that made WoW and Starcraft1. Morhaime made sure Adham was in on all those retrospective documentariesOriginally, Adham recruited Morhaime and Pierce. Adham is not some guy that moved from marketing department of Pepsi-Cola over to Blizzard. Adham graduated as an electrical engineer and is a life time video game industry veteran. The guy bleeds Blizzard blue.
This retrospective video says a lot about Adham and the fact that overlord-boss-guy Morhaime defers to Adham throughout the video says a lot. Any one, greatly respected by Mike Morhaime is greatly respected by me.
Bobby Kotick Bobby Kotick has overseen the incubation and development of many great timeless franchises. ATVI was the first company to put an annualized release game on a 3-team 3-year cycle. Contrast that with how EA handles its annualized releases. So each of the 3 CoD teams, Infinity Ward, SledgeHammer, and Treyarch have 3 years to make a game. Kotick is not afraid to spend money and grant long development times to make a great game. Because Kotick works on the financial side of ATVI he'll never be seen as the "good cop". That label is saved for the software creators. He'll always have to take on the "Bad Cop" role because someone has to set a limit on spending. Someone has to pull the plug on stuff that isn't working. Someone has to end Guitar Hero development when its clear consumers have grown bored of the genre. That said, Kotick is a great visionary and is not afraid to spend money. He is video game industry lifer. This is the best we can hope for from a financial//accounting guy.
Great PC Games Of The Future I'm not saying Blizzard is still the dream company it was 15 years ago with Pardo, Morhaime and Adham in their prime having just cranked out Brood War, Diablo2 and WoW. That said, ATVI seems more willing to spend money and grant more development time to insure a quality game than many other giant publishers. In a fantasy dream world can I imagine a better game maker than Blizzard partnered with a better publisher? yea sure, the Blizzard of 2004 would be the ultimate. However, we are not in a fantasy world; we are in the real world. In the real world of 2019, given the choices available, I think Blizzard remains the best hope for great, large-scale PC games in the future. For me Starcraft2, Diablo3, Hearthstone and Overwatch continue to be really good games. Outside of the PC world, Diablo3 on Switch is a masterpiece for that platform.
Guys like Kotick and Adham provided incredible vision and leadership in past decades. In short, I think they'll provide more great leadership in the future. I think Blizzard remains the best hope for PC players seeking large scale epic gaming experiences.
DISCLAIMER: Destiny 2 and Starcraft 2 SC2 and Destiny2 are the games I play the most and I've been happy with them for a long time. This might colour my optimistic opinion about the future of ATVI and Blizzard. Before those games I played Borderlands2 and Age of Empires2. As good as BL2 and AoE2 are ... Blizzard made a better RTS game and Bungie's Destiny2 is better than Borderlands 2. . Source Of Blizzard's Revenue, Profit and MAU's: https://investor.activision.com/financial-information/quarterly-results
Yeah, but then Diablo Immortal happened, people are leaving WoW en-masse, HotS is dead, Diablo 3 is overshadowed by Path of Exile, Hearthstone has more and more competition etc.
Blizzard needs to make something happen fast, but we know Blizzard and nothing good happens fast with them... Another thing to note is that judging by the rumors Activision is encroaching more and more on Blizzard and supposedly forcing them into much faster release cycles.
These are hard times for all AAA publishers though. EA is failing, Bethesda is failing, Ubisoft is failing, T2 is failing (just look at their stock prices over the past several months - they all took around 30-50% dip and are staying that way).
Edit:
I just want my Warcraft 3: Reforged and Diablo 2 remaster. After that I don't really care what happens to Blizzard.
great speech by Jobs. he nails down the failures of Xerox perfectly.
Blizzard doesn't have a monopoly the way Xerox held a monopoly on the photocopy industry. Nothing in the gaming industry resembles the standard 70s, 80s, and 90s era black and white photocopy machine. Xerox had such a monopoly that the word "Xerox" evolved to mean the word "photocopy". This is not the state of the gaming industry and its not the state of Blizzard. The "Xerox" machine provided an identical function from 1970 to 1999. From in 1975 to 1980 the video game industry changed radically. Pick any 5 year span and the gaming industry changes substantially. Even products made for the primitive Atari 2600 changed radically in a matter of 2 years. XBOX1 and PS4 evolve with new hardware.
Adham, Brack and Kotick are product people. They are not "sales and marketing". To more precisely define Brack, Adham and Kotick I'd like to introduce a term Alvin Toeffler defined in his book "FutureShock". Brack, Adham and Kotick are Pro-sumers. They are both producers and consumers.
Many big Youtubers channels with 100,000 to 1 million subscribers are run by prosumers. People like AngryJoe, Mark Dice, Philip Defranco. These guys are both consumers of the media and producers of the same media.
The foundation of Blizzard were all Prosumers. Frank Pierce, MIke Morhaime, and Allan Adham are prosumers. Pierce and Adham are still at Blizz.
If ATVI's leadership devolves into the 20th century leadership at Xerox then ATVI is in BIG trouble.
On January 03 2019 19:29 Manit0u wrote:Another thing to note is that judging by the rumors Activision is encroaching more and more on Blizzard and supposedly forcing them into much faster release cycles.
The part of this rumour that contains some truth ... the days of "Soon TM" are gone. No longer does Blizzard resemble a successful , trailblazing rock band that music labels are afraid to interfere with.
I dispute these rumours because they are too vague. Exactly what is "much faster release cycles"? ATVI has never been shy about putting big funding into very long development cycles. Bungie took a very long time to pump out Destiny 1. Bungie was then one year late on Destiny 2. ATVI lengthened the development cycles for its CoD games. Each of 3 different companies have 3 years to make a CoD game. WoL took forever; in 2010 the expansion pack meant something new a few months after a major game release. Blizzard smashed that taking 2.5 years to make Heart of the Swarm. 2.5 years for an expansion pack? wtf?
If ATVI is forcing Blizzard into focusing primarily on games I think this is good. Blizzard has made some incredible games over the years while making mountains of money. The other non-game-creation stuff Blizzard has done over the years has been average at best. The live event experiences I've had at BlizzCon and OWL have been pretty good.. right up there with any WWE or UFC live event. The problem is that WWE and UFC make big money promoting live events while giving consumers a great experience. Blizzard live events, as fun as they are, make no money.
I just read an article about game they cancelled with codename "Starblo", which I believe would have been awesome. Well, I think all their cancelled games could have been awesome. So that's one thing that did go wrong the last 15 years.
And as much as I love the remakes, you'll never get much revenue out of these. You can't sell WC3 remake for 50€
I still think they'll recover though, but the next big announcement has to be the thing. And it has to be for fucking PC
I just want to leave here that while most companies are falling down from the Summer values, please look at the graph from the whole year. Only EA, Bethesda and ATVI are falling then. Most of the companies are on their year-old value. Which is troublesome, but it respects the general graph for the year cycle - January18 - low value(e.g. 50) - Summer18 - top value(e.g. 100) - January19 = January 18(e.g. 50 +-). What happened in previous years was, that the new "old" value in January would be higher, not the same, so there was a growth(e.g. 50 - 100 - 60). But generally speaking all the big companies I searched recently for have the same graph, topping the charts during summer. Some have the cycle longer for some weird reason.
IIRC Ubisoft and T2 are stagnating from longer view.
While I am no market expert even I know this isn't good but it's not exactly bad for them. A year of stagnation can be survived, if the fall will continue even this year then they're bad.
On the other hand we still had awesome games this year the past year from AAA publishers and some great suppose to come. So if the shitty companies who don't want to change their ways go down, so be it. Sadly T2 owns Rockstar Games
As much as I love(d) Blizzard I'm happy to see AAA game publishers facing hard times. They've lived in a dream bubble for the past few years and it HAD to burst at some point. Time and time again they've abused the goodwill of their customers treating them like cattle and only catering to investors. When they give themselves impossible aims for their releases and say that when you ship 9 million copies of a game and call it a failure I think they deserve the hole they dug themselves into. Then they introduce scummy microtransactions and say 60$ for a game is simply not enough in today's world. I say if they can't run a profitable business selling 9 million copies at a minimum 60$ a pop and still failing, they need to leave the industry.
And why is this the current state of the gaming industry? Because people with passion, talent and pro-consumer not pro-investor views are being pushed out of the top of these gaming industries by marketing clowns and ruthless CEOs/CFOs. Why take 3+ years to deliver a good quality product when you can shit out a half-baked battlefield, call of duty, farcry or assassin's creed EVERY year? (although addmitedly the last 2 ACs were decent enough products...)
These people mentioned above are so out-of-touch with the people who buy their games that they're willing to tell you, the customer, that you are WRONG in what you want. You want engaging storylines? Nah no you don't, you want a fast-action packed shooter. You want an offline singleplayer RPG game? Nah you want a battle royale of our IP this year. I'm SO glad other studios are still making games like Dad of War, Spider-man and RDR2. Because they know there is still a market for these. They don't give themselves unobtainable predictions and double down on what they know how to do. The money will come. Will ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD come? Hell no. But enough money to make a profit? Hell yes. Look at steams most played list you'll see titles like Warframe, Dota2, CS:GO, Path of Exile and some flavour of the month games like PUBG etc. Point is, these people (with PUBG being the exception) pour their time and life into these games over years to keep them good and up to date. Sure they make money along the way but it's a give and take relationship. EA and Activision if they could, would want direct access to your wallet. They are willing to fight nations like Belgium and The Netherlands for their right to treat you like cattle and abuse you at every turn.
Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts are the market giants and it will take a lot to bring them down. But the bigger they are the harder they fall. And do not even for one second think that good games will stop being made. Its an ecosystem. Their corpses will make way and let breathe new developers, those that aren't consumed by greed just yet.
Overwatch became a zero revenue product for ATVI during the month of October when it placed the game in a Humble Bundle. Bargain hunters picked up the game for $12. So.. $0 is the only place to go from here. I think Pachter will be proven correct.
On January 04 2019 00:47 Latham wrote: EA and Activision if they could, would want direct access to your wallet. They are willing to fight nations like Belgium and The Netherlands for their right to treat you like cattle and abuse you at every turn.
its so pathetic ... it is hilarious. EA acts like they are some kind of moral authority regarding how World War 2 should be presented. They claim they are taking the moral high ground with their Battlefield product. Meanwhile, they ignore laws and vow to fight laws in European countries that their products break.
On January 04 2019 00:47 Latham wrote: As much as I love(d) Blizzard I'm happy to see AAA game publishers facing hard times. They've lived in a dream bubble for the past few years and it HAD to burst at some point. Time and time again they've abused the goodwill of their customers treating them like cattle and only catering to investors. When they give themselves impossible aims for their releases and say that when you ship 9 million copies of a game and call it a failure I think they deserve the hole they dug themselves into. Then they introduce scummy microtransactions and say 60$ for a game is simply not enough in today's world. I say if they can't run a profitable business selling 9 million copies at a minimum 60$ a pop and still failing, they need to leave the industry.
And why is this the current state of the gaming industry? Because people with passion, talent and pro-consumer not pro-investor views are being pushed out of the top of these gaming industries by marketing clowns and ruthless CEOs/CFOs. Why take 3+ years to deliver a good quality product when you can shit out a half-baked battlefield, call of duty, farcry or assassin's creed EVERY year? (although addmitedly the last 2 ACs were decent enough products...)
These people mentioned above are so out-of-touch with the people who buy their games that they're willing to tell you, the customer, that you are WRONG in what you want. You want engaging storylines? Nah no you don't, you want a fast-action packed shooter. You want an offline singleplayer RPG game? Nah you want a battle royale of our IP this year. I'm SO glad other studios are still making games like Dad of War, Spider-man and RDR2. Because they know there is still a market for these. They don't give themselves unobtainable predictions and double down on what they know how to do. The money will come. Will ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD come? Hell no. But enough money to make a profit? Hell yes. Look at steams most played list you'll see titles like Warframe, Dota2, CS:GO, Path of Exile and some flavour of the month games like PUBG etc. Point is, these people (with PUBG being the exception) pour their time and life into these games over years to keep them good and up to date. Sure they make money along the way but it's a give and take relationship. EA and Activision if they could, would want direct access to your wallet. They are willing to fight nations like Belgium and The Netherlands for their right to treat you like cattle and abuse you at every turn.
Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts are the market giants and it will take a lot to bring them down. But the bigger they are the harder they fall. And do not even for one second think that good games will stop being made. Its an ecosystem. Their corpses will make way and let breathe new developers, those that aren't consumed by greed just yet.
I think it's really easy to paint the large publishers as the bad guys, but it's also easy to forget that for each small project that grew into an amazing title like warframe, dota and PoE there are a hundred of decent titles that didn't make it and left their dev with a lot of net-losses/loans. So it's understandable that the mega-publishers look for safe ways to produce a stable revenue, since most of the gaming industry can't and the titles they produce are so expensive that every miss massively hurts them. It's also really easy to blame the marketing/management people for cutting projects short that would have needed time for bugfixing and polishing, but a bunch of studios which got bought by EA said that initially they got too much money and added too many features instead of using the additional time for bugfixing, producing bloated titles with mediocre features and making the bugfixing even harder (bfme2 is such a case f.e.). So EA went with the opposite and started pushing release dates and cut after-production time to stop the money-sink.
I'm not defending their price policies and I haven't bought anything from EA and Atvi (last thing was d3 RoS) in a while, in fact I'm not buying anything that I have to pay to play that has micro-transactions. But I think it's really easy to forget how cutthroat the industry is and how hard it is to keep a company floating for more than one title, even without all the bullcrap like bandwagoning for whatever reason.
I also have doubts that the death of the mega-publishers would lead to any significant change in the industry barring the end of high end graphics titles and a forcing an opening of consoles to the indie market. If anything AAA titles provide an easy way for casual gamers to play decently polished titles without reading a lot of reviews or doing any research.
On January 04 2019 00:47 Latham wrote: As much as I love(d) Blizzard I'm happy to see AAA game publishers facing hard times. They've lived in a dream bubble for the past few years and it HAD to burst at some point. Time and time again they've abused the goodwill of their customers treating them like cattle and only catering to investors. When they give themselves impossible aims for their releases and say that when you ship 9 million copies of a game and call it a failure I think they deserve the hole they dug themselves into. Then they introduce scummy microtransactions and say 60$ for a game is simply not enough in today's world. I say if they can't run a profitable business selling 9 million copies at a minimum 60$ a pop and still failing, they need to leave the industry.
And why is this the current state of the gaming industry? Because people with passion, talent and pro-consumer not pro-investor views are being pushed out of the top of these gaming industries by marketing clowns and ruthless CEOs/CFOs. Why take 3+ years to deliver a good quality product when you can shit out a half-baked battlefield, call of duty, farcry or assassin's creed EVERY year? (although addmitedly the last 2 ACs were decent enough products...)
These people mentioned above are so out-of-touch with the people who buy their games that they're willing to tell you, the customer, that you are WRONG in what you want. You want engaging storylines? Nah no you don't, you want a fast-action packed shooter. You want an offline singleplayer RPG game? Nah you want a battle royale of our IP this year. I'm SO glad other studios are still making games like Dad of War, Spider-man and RDR2. Because they know there is still a market for these. They don't give themselves unobtainable predictions and double down on what they know how to do. The money will come. Will ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD come? Hell no. But enough money to make a profit? Hell yes. Look at steams most played list you'll see titles like Warframe, Dota2, CS:GO, Path of Exile and some flavour of the month games like PUBG etc. Point is, these people (with PUBG being the exception) pour their time and life into these games over years to keep them good and up to date. Sure they make money along the way but it's a give and take relationship. EA and Activision if they could, would want direct access to your wallet. They are willing to fight nations like Belgium and The Netherlands for their right to treat you like cattle and abuse you at every turn.
Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts are the market giants and it will take a lot to bring them down. But the bigger they are the harder they fall. And do not even for one second think that good games will stop being made. Its an ecosystem. Their corpses will make way and let breathe new developers, those that aren't consumed by greed just yet.
I think it's really easy to paint the large publishers as the bad guys, but it's also easy to forget that for each small project that grew into an amazing title like warframe, dota and PoE there are a hundred of decent titles that didn't make it and left their dev with a lot of net-losses/loans. So it's understandable that the mega-publishers look for safe ways to produce a stable revenue, since most of the gaming industry can't and the titles they produce are so expensive that every miss massively hurts them. It's also really easy to blame the marketing/management people for cutting projects short that would have needed time for bugfixing and polishing, but a bunch of studios which got bought by EA said that initially they got too much money and added too many features instead of using the additional time for bugfixing, producing bloated titles with mediocre features and making the bugfixing even harder (bfme2 is such a case f.e.). So EA went with the opposite and started pushing release dates and cut after-production time to stop the money-sink.
I'm not defending their price policies and I haven't bought anything from EA and Atvi (last thing was d3 RoS) in a while, in fact I'm not buying anything that I have to pay to play that has micro-transactions. But I think it's really easy to forget how cutthroat the industry is and how hard it is to keep a company floating for more than one title, even without all the bullcrap like bandwagoning for whatever reason.
I also have doubts that the death of the mega-publishers would lead to any significant change in the industry barring the end of high end graphics titles and a forcing an opening of consoles to the indie market. If anything AAA titles provide an easy way for casual gamers to play decently polished titles without reading a lot of reviews or doing any research.
Well, Kotei-Tecmo and Bandai-Namco somehow seem unaffected by the huge drops in stock market exchange other publishers are suffering from... And they're companies that mostly release the same franchises over and over again. The thing is, usually when they release a new iteration of a game it is better than its predecessor. Something EA fails at horribly.
On January 04 2019 00:47 Latham wrote: You want an offline singleplayer RPG game? Nah you want a battle royale of our IP this year.
Actually i think Single player RPGs are doing really good. In last few years we had: Pillars 1 & 2, Witcher 3, Orginal Sin 1& 2, Tyranny, Kingmaker, Tides of Numenara, DA:I, Wasteland 2. Which all are decent to very good games. And also some top but not really good games: -->Fallout 4. Behind that we get some games from indie and smaller publishers which there are also a plenty, so in my opinion the genre is strong. No thanks to Blizzard, Activision, Ubisoft and EA but they were never that important to this genre.
On January 04 2019 02:13 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: We are fast approaching a AAA games dark age of some sorts.
Why do you think? because some shitty distributors are shitty?
God of War, NieR:Automata, Red Dead Redemption 2, Spider Man, Pillars of Eternity 2, Kingdom Come Deliverence, The Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Divinity Original Sin 2, South Park - The Fractured but Whole.
That's just some taste of games which are single player and story-driven and awesome to play and you can sink huge amount of time into them. All of these can be marked as AAA titles and were released in 2017 or 2018. And I am sure I am missing some games.
(and for 2016 we can add XCOM 2, Uncharted 4, Persona 5, The Last Guardian and how about Doom)
If EA and Blizzard falls, so be it. EA killed shit ton of good IPs with their shady business decisions. And Blizzard's merge is appearing more and more as Activision buying Blizzard, but in the end it's the fault of Blizzard. And besides SC2 I don't like any of the remaining IPs they own and I don't think they will come with anything new except "everyhing on mobiles" or "everything remastered" and they won't be releasing new StarCraft any soon anyway. There are other companies which can take their place.
On January 04 2019 00:47 Latham wrote: You want an offline singleplayer RPG game? Nah you want a battle royale of our IP this year.
Actually i think Single player RPGs are doing really good. In last few years we had: Pillars 1 & 2, Witcher 3, Orginal Sin 1& 2, Tyranny, Kingmaker, Tides of Numenara, DA:I, Wasteland 2. Which all are decent to very good games. And also some top but not really good games: -->Fallout 4. Behind that we get some games from indie and smaller publishers which there are also a plenty, so in my opinion the genre is strong. No thanks to Blizzard, Activision, Ubisoft and EA but they were never that important to this genre.
I already mentioned South Park, which is from Ubisoft and Might & Magic license is still in hands of Ubi. While M&M X wasn't the greatest dungeon game and isn't a true RPG it was still a good game.
EA owns BioWare. Thus they own Dragon Age & Mass Effect. While their decisions screwed up some of the RPG elements, ME 1 - 3 was still awesome story-driven experience and is one of the top RPGs in my mind. (I view RPG mostly as a story driven game where you "posses" the hero and role-play with him rather than several RNG simulators of equations In other words - good RPG can survive with minimal number playing, but awesome stat simulator won't be a good RPG game without good story. But that's just my view, just saying that EA technically had their impact on the RPG side of things).\
Edit of the edit> Also EA owns the Star Wars license AND the Knights of the Old Republic IP They're not doing much besides keeping the servers of SWTOR alive, but they can. (I would rather if they wouldn't for obvious reasons)
On January 04 2019 23:10 deacon.frost wrote: If EA and Blizzard falls, so be it. EA killed shit ton of good IPs with their shady business decisions. And Blizzard's merge is appearing more and more as Activision buying Blizzard, but in the end it's the fault of Blizzard. And besides SC2 I don't like any of the remaining IPs they own and I don't think they will come with anything new except "everyhing on mobiles" or "everything remastered" and they won't be releasing new StarCraft any soon anyway. There are other companies which can take their place
one thing i've noted in the past but not in this thread. the chart is in another thread .... i'll post it when i get a chance.
ATVI is a volatile stock. Its IV30 and IV120 metrics are above average. So it goes "too high" when there is good news and it goes "too low" when there is bad news. So, losing 48% when Nasdaq has only lost 22% is a bad sign... however.. by nature ATVI is volatile... this is what it does.
So the chance of Blizzard and/or ATVI "failing" is really low. However, what is happening is Blizzard is going through cutbacks. The cutbacks are because revenue is UP while profit is DOWN. Working in a big company while cutbacks are occurring is not fun.
We have "insider reporters" who talk to ATVI employees that are complaining about cutbacks. Then these "insiders" like Jason Schreier report what the employees are saying. Employees are not robots... if cutbacks are happening all around them its probably frightening and a few employees might exaggerate the extent of the bad things. Its these most extreme things that make for a news article that gets the most clicks and views. https://kotaku.com/with-activisions-influence-growing-blizzard-is-cutting-1831263741
If I'm working at a place and I say ... "its still good working here but it used to be great" no one is going to publish that. its too boring. We are getting this all through Scheier so who knows if his article is the 100% gospel truth or not. One thing we do know.. Schreier's stuff does generate interest.
Jason Schreier is doing what he does best.. he is making articles with some degree of truth in them that generate lots of views and clicks. This article i linked is getting referenced in dozens of places. Schreier is a smart guy.
At the end of it all... Revenue is up by 5% at Blizzard in 2018. They are cutting costs because profit is DOWN. Most companies do this when revenue is up and profits are down. Its standard business as usual.. but that is boring and won't generate many clicks and/or views.
On January 05 2019 02:37 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: how does two CFOs leaving in a week cut costs
yep, that is concerning. They did cut costs by ending HGC.
regarding the CFOs leaving. Spencer Neumann was replaced by Denis Durkin who was the ATVI CFO from 2012 to 2017. Denis Durkin has been in the video game industry since 2006. Denis Durkin is well qualified and might be even better qualified for the position than Neumann. Also, Notice Spencer Neumann left for a non-gaming industry position and arrived at ATVI from a non gaming industry position. He came from years at Walt Disney and left for Netflix. Neumann was not exactly uniquely qualified for the ATVI CFO job.
The Blizzard CFO... i have no opinion.
TL;DR : losing Spencer Neumann isn't a big deal. if people keep on leaving it is a concern though. interesting times.
Overwatch became a zero revenue product for ATVI during the month of October when it placed the game in a Humble Bundle. Bargain hunters picked up the game for $12. So.. $0 is the only place to go from here. I think Pachter will be proven correct.
On January 04 2019 00:47 Latham wrote: EA and Activision if they could, would want direct access to your wallet. They are willing to fight nations like Belgium and The Netherlands for their right to treat you like cattle and abuse you at every turn.
its so pathetic ... it is hilarious. EA acts like they are some kind of moral authority regarding how World War 2 should be presented. They claim they are taking the moral high ground with their Battlefield product. Meanwhile, they ignore laws and vow to fight laws in European countries that their products break.
Could You elaborate a little on this ? Or provide a link? Which laws exactly are they fighting?
ATVI and Ubisoft backed off and complied with Belgian authorities regarding loot boxes and cardpacks. EA is fighting them.
I think there is a similar stand off going on between EA and Netherlands as well. But, I'd need to do more research on that and get back to you.
EA has made some concessions due to pressure from various governments around the world. One of those concessions includes disclosing the odds of obtaining certain random prizes.
Its a complex situation and although EA is acting in a somewhat unethical way it is not nearly as simple as "EA Bad"//"Belgium Good".
EPT
from AAA publishers and some great suppose to come. So if the shitty companies who don't want to change their ways go down, so be it. Sadly T2 owns Rockstar Games 
They're not doing much besides keeping the servers of SWTOR alive, but they can. (I would rather if they wouldn't for obvious reasons)
