Steve C shares his thoughts on the situations at Activision Blizzard & Electronic Arts and talks about unrealistic profit expectations.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Today, Koei Tecmo announced its financial results for the full fiscal year 2025, related to the period between April 2025 and March 2026.
TNS - NCSoft CEO admitted that AI is rapidly becoming a core part of game development, but he added that it cannot replace what makes games fun.
To be fair, there are also human made games that release and lack any fun at all either.
Guild Wars 2 been playing for 14yrs, 1st beta. This is just one company I support, Arenanet and NCSoft, even though I torrent, there are a few PC companies I will buy from. "PlayStation’s Horizon MMO spin-off, Horizon Steel Frontiers." I feel this will be good, NCSoft is a good developer/publisher.
It’s a tool. Use it elevate things and get it done faster. I’m sorry but not every game made by humans is good. If this can help things, then I fully embrace it.
Layoff the hard workers while the rich executives keeps theirs with an added pay bonus.
Fun fact: The late Iwata cut his salary by 50% instead of laying off workers when fiscal results were poor. He said something along the lines of "it would create bad morale in the workforce if we layed off employees" (paraphrasing)
We need more guys like him. RIP Iwata.
Only those who don't run business wouldn't understand what and why Activision does. You don't keep workers just because YOU CAN.
Acti fired 800 employees due to their deinvestment in E-sports (HOTS,Hearthstone), Bungie leaving, winding down live services like WoW, and company restructuring. There's talk once WoW goes under a million subscribers it's going to set sail.
They are trying to have 10,000 people by 2020 and are going to be releasing more titles because they feel their model of relying on Tentpole type services has caused them to miss revenue. They can not continue releasing a single game and then continue updating it for years like they've done in the past.
This whole thing is a business act to plan for the future
While they may have made record profits this year, that won't be the same next year and the year after
And the funniest thing is all this happened due to people voting with their wallet
But this should have been done 5 years ago, instead of letting the entire sector get so bloated
It is Acti's fault for allowing the E-sport and community sector to become so bloated in the first place
People think 500 devs on one game is bloated but nobody is questioning the fact they have 800 people working in a sector that is financially draining them. Hence why they are hiring more developers instead of community engagement people.
If people actually read the financial reports, you can't exactly do what Iwata did in this situation because even if Kotick takes a paycut it's not gonna change the fact that they can't just move 800 people from the e-sport sector to somewhere else in the company given they don't have the qualifications or skills necessary to help them where it matters, and given the fact Iwata's cut was done to save actual devs from laid off there's a huge difference between this and that situation.
I won't lie though Kotick is still your average fat-cat and continues to rake in money, but he did not get there to his position out of luck in the first place. If people actually thought with logic and read the actual reports instead of lashing out with emotions demanding everyone above them be fired, then we wouldn't be in a capitalistic society. It's ironic how the whole thing was caused by these same groups telling everyone to vote with their wallet, now they're mad that people did.