If Valve gets their grimy hands on it...
Did I just say grimy? I meant lustrous and beautiful.
If Valve gets their grimy hands on it...
Did I just say grimy? I meant lustrous and beautiful.
Originally Posted by High Overlord Saurfangi7-6700 @2.8GHz | Nvidia GTX 960M | 16GB DDR4-2400MHz | 1 TB Toshiba SSD| Dell XPS 15
Ok things are happening now. Vivendi CEO has been ousted. One scenerio being discused would be VERY bad for ATVI: extracting its value via leveraging.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
Well it looks like they really want to do it
http://www.vg247.com/2012/06/29/repo...r-8-1-billion/
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/0...85R17E20120629
Looks like a sale is imminent.
Valar morghulis
He compares tablet and smartphone games to actual PC and console gaming? I question this mans "insight".
He also left out the release of MoP and Heart of the Swarm.
---------- Post added 2012-06-29 at 11:25 PM ----------
Better to sell while they can get something for it. Vivendi seemes to be in debts they want to pay off as well. There is no drama or anything about this, to be honest.
I was posting from a mobile platform there and had to be brief. Let me explain what this means.
Vivendi has debts, so they need to raise some cash. One possibility would be to sell their stake in ATVI to another company. But there aren't too many who would want it and could afford it. (Maybe some Chinese game company?)
Alternately, they could sell the stock on the open market. But this would drive down the stock price, and could take a while.
The most likely approach would be to extract value from ATVI by leveraging. This vampirish maneuver would work like this:
-- Cause ATVI to borrow as much money as they can.
-- Distribute all that money (and the cash ATVI has on hand) to the shareholders in a huge dividend.
-- Distribute the (greatly devalued) shares Vivendi would still hold to the shareholders of Vivendi, to dispose of as they see fit.
Basically, Vivendi would monetize all the future worth of ATVI and cause it to leave the company. What would be left would be a desperately leveraged shell, with a depleted bank account, that would have to pick and scratch for every dollar it could to service an enormous debt. If things ever went bad, it would be a short road to bankruptcy. On the plus side, if the company did better than expected, the percentage upside in its stock price could be very large.
In that kind of environment, the pennypinching and revenue enhancement we've seen from Blizzard would be nothing compared to what they'd be prepared to do. I expect lots of RM items and services would be added to WoW.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
Valve is probably really interested in having the leading competitor to Battlefield franchise. That whole World of warcraft thing isn't so bad either.
Wouldn't it be tragic if EA bought it out =P
We would all have to download origin!
EA and Valve do not have the capitol to buy out actiblizz from vivendi.
Honestly.. there are only two companies currently able to buy Activision Blizzard.
NCsoft (huge loans but possible) and Microsoft.
Apple is not interested Sony is as red as the streets here in amsterdam.
And nintendo doesnt have the cash to buy it without making itself into a death trap. Besides those EA is constantly named well EA doesnt have anywhere near the cash for this and the idea of Valve obtaining it is even sillier they make less money then EA by a long strech.
Honestly looking at the only real option would be for Microsoft to be interested. And i might see that happening if Activision wasnt attached to Blizzard. Microsoft would i think love to have its claws in one of the biggest PC game developer there is. But besides microsoft i dont see anybody else buying it. Yes maybe some company that is not related to gaming in any way like a telephone/oil company.
simple google search of "How much does a WoW subscription cost in China?(the first result)" could have easily prevented you having to pull numbers out of your ass....the government controls nearly everything that goes on in that country , business-wise, why would their involvement in this area be remarkable?!? The way they count subscribers is described fully and is accurate from that description...you seem to be taking issue with things that are not based in reality....i'm sorry you feel the need make things up about a video game company to make yourself feel somehow superior or not taking the "word" from the "man" but maybe your misguided energies could be put to a better use at the "likes to make shit up" boards of yet unreleased games that will kill wow/diablo/starcraft in the next 12-18 months
how does selling 4.7 million copies in on month = 5 million ever?!?...that would have to mean they only sold 300k over the next 2 years....that would not even come close to accounting for the churn in the player base over those 2 years...
back on point what does this have to do with Vivendi trying to make 8.1 billion by selling the interest they own in AB exactly?!?
NCsoft last quarter recorded 12,410,000,000 KRW in profit(an entire quarter!!! 3 whole months wtf are they doing over there eeck)that's 10,755,767.74 USD(rofl i knew ncsoft was small time but 10 mil for all that effort!?!) so this huge loan would burden NCsoft and AB so heavily that they would probably be underwater and in chapter 11 in 12 months... so possible in the terms that both companies would be part of literally one of the most spectacular financial blunders, ever, discounting there being a bank willing to burn 8 billion for the chance to deal with the fallout from giving them the money in the first place...so you'd kill 2 gaming companies and the bank, seems plausible given the past financial decisions we've seen...and i fully support it if it means that sacrificing blizzard destroys the insidious cancer that is NCSoft, i highly suggest you get a campaign to make this happen now!!!
Last edited by epiccollision; 2012-07-01 at 04:12 PM.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
The only logical buyer to me is Disney.. There is no reason why MS/Sony want them since WoW is competing with console market.. Not to mention WoW runs on Apple..
No other game company has the cash to buy Activision.. So no way that's ever going to happen.
So really.. it's only Disney.. they would probably benefit the most from WoW + Skylander IP (theme park anyone?)
I wonder if there would be any potential for the minority shareholders (as a class) to legally block this. What you describe would be extremely prejudicial to them. Also, I have read that vivendi doesn't have an actual voting majority (some shares are a voteless class). Would they be able to get mgmt to vote their shares (I suspect atvi mgmt is collectively a big chunk of the non-vivendi shares) in favor of the destruction of their long-term careers and stock options?
I am not immediately aware of a good recent example of a us-traded public company with a majority owner being able to be so openly looted (or I have forgotten one).
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
creating a major taxable event for shareholders this big is a big deal.
pretty sure there are some pretty specific protections for minority shareholders, and don't know enough to say what vivendi can and cannot do without giving the rest of the shareholders legal basis to oppose it.
If anyone following this thread is familiar with securities law as it would pertain to this, I would be interested in hearing it. The size of an 8b special dividend as speculated in some 3rd party material is beyond what I can recall seeing.
Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.
Yeah right, they are selling it for 8.1 billion if we put any value on the article linked above. Electronic arts assets are roughly worth 5 billion, which means they could easily get a loan worth 8.1 billion to buy activision blizzard. Realistically they could even get a loan out for more than 50 billion with that much assets.
So yes, they are good for the money.