Arkham
DC
There are rumblings going on right now that Warner Bros. is looking to get out of the video game business, and their loss could be an enormous gain for another company.
While reports first surfaced (via The Information) with word that Microsoft was a chief contender for WB Interactive’s developers for a rumored price of $4 billion, others were soon added to the potential list of suitors including three of the biggest publishers in the world, Take-Two, Activision-Blizzard and Electronic Arts. There remain conflicting reports on whether WB is actually going to sell in the end, and for now this is mostly just talk.
The focus of this story has been on Microsoft mainly, however, and for good reason. First, they’re a much larger corporation than any of the others, the gaming division being part of a more massive whole. Second, they have been on an absolute tear buying up developers over the past year or two in an effort to shore up their first party offerings. Purchasing WB Interactive like this would offer them their most significant slate of acquisitions in one fell swoop.
Here’s what we believe the full line-up of developers would be, though it’s not clear if all would survive such a transition:
- Avalanche Software
- Monolith Productions
- NetherRealm
- Rocksteady
- TTGames
- WB Games Boston/Montréal/New York/San Francisco/San Diego
- Portkey Games
But what would be a huge win for Microsoft would be a loss for a certain segment of gamers, if this deal went through. While there is a contingent that does not want to see the likes of Activision or EA take control of these studios, given the problems with those corporate entities and some of their past acquisitions and eventual executions, those deals would mean that Rocksteady, NetherRealm, etc. games would continue to come to all platforms.
If Microsoft is the one buying them up, however, while those upcoming games would be released on Xbox Series X/S/One and PC, they would be skipping Sony systems and however many millions of players own PS4s and PS5s this coming generation. And that would be a change from games like Mortal Kombat and Arkham being readily available on any platform before this, if the IPs remained with those studios.
And yet it is hard not to understand how this would be a massive win for Microsoft, and how it falls exactly in line with their goal to get must-have exclusives on the Xbox ecosystem, something they mostly failed to do last generation outside of a scarce handful of big games.
In this industry, who knows what will happen. Take-Two has essentially unlimited money thanks to the GTA 5 cash cow, and could put up a solid bid. EA has been on a fairly decent hot streak recently and has done well with acquisitions like Respawn. Activision needs a studio that actually makes and releases games rather than Blizzard which is stuck in some sort of stasis field. So who knows. But Microsoft makes the most sense, based on their past actions and current needs. We’ll see what happens.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulta...d-netherrealm-would-be-a-force-of-nature/amp/
