Activision Blizzard doubles down on mobile games

I think Activision might be overestimating how easy it is to make ore money in the mobile market though; with the clampdowns on revenue streams i.e. loot boxes are gambling and, more importantly, the very low bar to entry into the entire mobile market (since the entire world market is not split by console and the complications of PC rather just two ecosystems which are buildable with every programming system out there with no real changes on the developer side (other than maybe data collection issues). The competition in the mobile game market is clearly already insane with the number of games coming to mobile having eclipsed those coming to PC, console and handheld (even if you treat releases for each separately) some considerable (by technology standards) time ago. The market is indeed big but the numbers of devs, ease of reach, new entrants and simplicity of building for mobile mean that the expected share of pie is definitely smaller, not to mention the issue that dedication and stickiness of gamers in the mobile space is WAAAAAAAAYYY down compared to Activision's traditional markets and "the new trendy" thing is much more important and changes so frequently as to make PC gaming look like it is not moving, word of mouth is also so much more important and so many traditional PC devs are doing such a bad job of reputation that they really have no advantage of size at all. If they hope to flood the market they are crazy, the market is already flooded and their IP just isn't going to help them... likely only increase their costs and reduce their value - particularly given their traditional fans will become less interested in those IPs. The desire to expand in China, Brazil and India also ignores the on-the-ground fact that big IPs have already been ripped off and anything they do will instantly be duplicated by many in the market (even if it doesn't work) and clamping down on that in China will be nigh on impossible and playing whack-a-mole in Brazil and India is something that suggests that most of their 2000 new employees will have to be lawyers. All os this assumes that every other big dev doesn't do the same thing and that they are willing to low ball the likes of EA who will do anything for a buck, including sell gambling apps to children and entice them to spent thousands of dollars of their parents money binding them into illegal (in Europe) EULAs... unless Activision is willing to at least compete with that, nevermind all the one man dev temas willing to go so much lower then they will do nothing but make a bad name for themselves and bring down the clamps of regulation all the harder across all of their markets rather than more targetted ones on the real game space that is causing so many of these problems to run riot... and all of this ignores the impact of COVID on these estimates... I, for one, can tell you now that unless the mobile gaming industry invest heavily in stopping the COVID pandemic from being solved that their future predictions are totally out of whack with a huge number of mobile gamers dropping out of the market or reducing their consumption (and spending) due to having to work again or finding work again as the world's economy recovers and governments reduce support for those financially impacted by COVID... which will gradually happen even if the pandemic is not solved in the short term since most governments are spending in an unsustainable way to deal with this problem - in this respect the way the USA government is acting is more rational (assuming you do not value human life and happiness).

are we really at the point where boo-urns is not immediately recognized as the height of humor? I weep.

Huh. Who'd've seen Blizzard being the WoW killer...? :thinking: