Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard was one of the biggest news stories of 2022, and in the months that followed, the story got more and more complicated. Early investor sentiment said the merger wouldn’t go through; the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to keep it from happening. And recently, PlayStation’s Jim Ryan met with European Union anti-trust regulators. Now, an Activision Blizzard executive has taken to Twitter to push for the merger’s completion based on the success of the television adaptation of The Last of Us.
Activision COO Lulu Cheng Meservey claims that because Sony has such a “warchest (sic) of [intellectual property]” ripe for conversion to other media, the competition argument for not completing the merger is a moot point. Moreover, because the library is so vast and high-quality, Sony can use it to push additional hardware based on the interest in PlayStation games that media generates, according to Meservey.
The last Tweet, as seen below is particularly noteworthy, as it is both a backhanded compliment to Sony and an outright attack on the FTC unlikely to win Activision any favors with the agency.
The whole argument is also bizarre because Activision and Microsft have at least a few titles they could quickly turn into their own media empire, especially if the merger concludes. Indeed, Blizzard tried to do it with the ill-fated Warcraft movie, but with a defter hand, the company could take Diablo, Overwatch, or Call of Duty in interesting directions that satisfy both veteran players and wider viewing audiences alike.
There’s also an issue of equivalency here. Part of the reason The Last of Us works isn’t because of its total adherence to the game. Episode three’s examination of Bill’s life is nowhere in the original story, yet social media is awash with praise for it. Sure, the show might be generating renewed interest in the game, but is that simply because it uses the same name, or because the quality is so high?
Meservey’s comments about Sony’s non-gaming properties are also interesting. Should the Microsoft purchase of Activision come to fruition, the company would have a massive library of household names to draw for inspiration. Activision’s advertisements for Call of Duty alone have included the likes of Robert Downey Jr. as far back as Black Ops II. As large a company as Sony might be, it doesn’t have nearly the financial weight to throw around that Microsoft does, and adding the owner of Candy Crush to their library is liable to recoup whatever losses accrued in the acquisition.
Published: Jan 30, 2023 02:15 pm