Activision Blizzard is a company. Playstation is a brand in a company.
Sony had higher net revenue than Activision Blizzard.
Netflix could be Microsofts next Acquisition - Needham Analyst
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Sony had higher net revenue than Activision Blizzard.
This.....this why you here lol
I feel these things need to be explained, it gives better context
I don't really see the difference. Both AB and PS are 100% gaming, so they are comparable. I'd also compare Nintendo and Xbox to it (Nintendo has higher profits than AB but Nintendo is profit king after all).
I think @Dodkrake take was Playstation is a sub business thats vital to the larger company that is non-gaming. Sony as a company was never originally a gaming company they were a product company.
Activision/Blizzard have always been a publishing/Development house.
Bad habits have definitely caught up with Netflix, for sure. They also have this obsession with releasing all episodes at once. It's great for binge watching, but online talk and discussion of their shows drops off earlier than it should. I think that happened with Stranger Things Season 3, for example.
An episode or two per week would probably do better for long-term engagement. Maybe save the "all episodes of season at once" idea for limited series that are only going to be 3-6 episodes anyway. If those do well enough, then make a proper series out of them.
They might do it with a Family Plan; Nintendo's got a Family Plan that's $32/mo, but that's for multiple NSO accounts and (I guess) sharing games and features across them like a singular account.
If MS & Netflix (btw this wouldn't require an acquisition, it could just be through a partnership) felt it were worth it, they could do a GamePass & Netflix family plan for like $60/mo. It might be a really hard sell, but there are ISP packages that cost more, same with cable TV & satellite packages. Their biggest obstacle would be marketing though and convincing people it's worth such a price when most subs will be either gamers who compare it to PS+, or people in the streaming ecosystem who'll compare it to Disney+, HBO Max etc., especially people who don't need a Family Plan, and ask why it'd cost them so much.
Like, why pay, even solo, $420/year for GPU & Netflix (or let's just say $360/year, if they give a discount) when you can pay $300/year for PS+ Premium & Netflix? Especially if MS doesn't get a consistent flow of big 1P content coming out regularly, which was the big pitch with GamePass years back they've been struggling to get going.
So, yeah, it's possible, probably with a Family Plan as a best option, but I don't know if it'd do very well. They would probably be better off licensing out select Netflix shows to include in GPU subscriptions maybe on a rotation. Like, "hey, here's the new season of Squid Game with your GamePass subscription!" or something like that.
Operating costs would definitely be lower since MS own the full hardware & software stack WRT Azure. They aren't paying anyone else to use cloud tech the way Netflix currently pays Amazon. Though, if MS have to expand Azure capacity for the added content anyway, it negates a portion of the upfront savings.
Still though it's a needle-in-haystack chance they ever acquire Netflix. I think anti-competitive issues would prevent it.
Good points. But, those saying it might be a bad deal could also be right. Ultimately it's about if MS can ensure they either stabilize Netflix's numbers after a buyout, help them grow/recover, or (what every company making an acquisition wants) boost the value of the purchased asset beyond where it was previous in terms of peak value.
That's why when I say when I'm against MS going after another major acquisition (which Netflix would qualify as, obviously), it's because I still want to see what they do with the current acquisitions of Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Bethesda & Zenimax, etc. I think we can look at some like Playground Games and say that they've since been able to grow or at least sustain their level pre-acquisition, and there's a chance we can see growth (depending on how Fable lands), but they're kind of the outlier so far.
Obsidian, at least for the interim, seems to have scaled down going from stuff like Outer Worlds to Grounded & Pentiment (Avowed could be something quite bigger, though). Ninja Theory put out arguably their worst game after the acquisition, in Bleeding Edge, and while Hellblade II looks promising, we still don't know if it's going to be great or push that concept into a bigger space. Same can be said of Bethesda; we still need to see where Starfield hits to know if they've either stabilized in terms of quality, will exceed previous peaks (Skyrim, Morrowind etc.), or if stuff like FO'76 was a signal for longer-term decline. We won't know until the game releases.
But keep in mind some of these acquisitions go as far back as 2018, four years ago, and yeah game dev takes a while but that just means that much longer we have to wait to see some of these results, therefore it's a compounding issue for me when we see rumors like MS maybe looking to acquire Netflix pop up. Because Netflix isn't a gaming-related thing, that's true, but the same factors would be at play. Shorter window of time between acquisition and seeing the fruits of labor under MS, maybe, but now we're talking a space MS doesn't have much long-term experience in. Stuff like the Halo show absolutely do not help the optics there, either, and that show took 10 years. Would it take 20 years for us to get a Netflix show under MS featuring one of their brands that's actually at least decent?
Would the average quality of Netflix content get better under MS? Would it skyrocket? Or would it continue to decline? Would marketing across the board improve, stay the same, or decline? None of this stuff has to do with hard data numbers, honestly, but they're equally important questions to ask especially from us as we're the ones consuming the content being created. We need to know what these big buyouts and whatnot do for us in improving our hobby with quality content we maybe wouldn't have gotten otherwise, not just how the data and money is good business for the suits and stocks.
I don't disagree really with any of this as clearly things can change and its feasible that MS might not be able to stop the decline and how MS deals with such a buyout is key.
I still stand by it would still be a smart deal as Netflix on its bad day is still the number 1 streaming giant by a fuck ton. If MS can buy em, they should as they'd be number 1 for years before anyone came close. Amazon imho is the one to look out for as they've made some solid moves to try to chip away at Netflix.
They outbid them on some big contracts, like God Of War and that Fallout show. Buying MGM is also massive and Amazon starting to add in reality shows like Hamptons shows they are looking to take on Netflix directly more then I think most streaming platforms. In terms of quality, Amazon and Netflix are the ones to beat as their budgets are record breaking and they are setting the tone for how streaming should be treated as a platform, so I think under MS you'd still see those types of budgets so they'd do fine with quality. Regardless, how that turns out will be based on how MS treats that buyout if it ever even takes place.
You sure? I mean again, we can look at the gaming side of things as a comparison. Several of the teams MS have purchased seem to be focusing on smaller, less expensive productions, at least in the interim. Look at Obsidian for example (this is not counting Avowed, tho we don't know where that will land budget-wise; we also don't know where Outer Worlds 2 will land in terms of budget the first game didn't actually have a large budget tbh), or what we've heard from Double Fine wanting to do more, smaller projects probably even smaller than Psychonauts 2 by a considerable margin. And from what we've seen of Starfield so far, that isn't a game that "looks" like it's gotten a budget any higher than Bethesda's previous releases the past six years or so, outside of the typical increases due to economic reasons and general increase in AAA production.
Tho I personally don't think budgets mean everything when it comes to quality of something, especially if talking stuff like film or television, it does help, but what are the chances a Netflix under Microsoft suddenly starts standardizing the budgets they give to, say, Stranger Things or Squid Game, to all of the big shows, or increase the budgets considerably? And would they be able to do that for the volume of shows Netflix makes, and ensure the same for their games from a lot of those 30+ studios they'll have once ABK deal clears?
Overall yeah, in terms of shoring up subscriber numbers, shoring up numbers great for chest-puffing against competitors that can be used to maybe lure in future initiatives, and locking in some strong annual revenue, MS buying Netflix makes a lot of sense. I don't know if it would get APPROVED, since that'd be the second absolutely significant purchase by Microsoft in the span of just a few years, and they'd be buying their way to #1 in a market they've not even competed or invested funds into previously (and anti-competitive laws don't mind for market leaders that come from natural competition, they just have issue with those who buy their way to market prominence skipping the competition part). But it would make a lot of sense from that perspective.
However I don't think many Netflix productions get approved or funded at big levels in the case MS buy them, given budgets MS also have to allocate to games development and marketing. Or at least, the scale of what Netflix would put out volume-wise would reduce noticeably. Just my opinion.
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