Aww bless, he’s back! The beloved Bobby Kotick, the star of many a News Snatch for his ridiculous sounds bites, has gone on CNBC’s Squawk Box to talk about the Microsoft – Activision Blizzard deal, and he’s got a bee in his bonnet about the UK. The CMA is currently scrutinising the deal and today came up with a few suggestions, which you can read about here, but Bob was having none of that.
“Well, you look at the UK and you think about post-Brexit UK, it’s probably the first country where you’re seeing a recession and the real, severe consequences of a recession,” began Kotick.
Good start, but factually incorrect. The third quarter of 2022 saw a 0.3% contraction in the UK, but after a 0.5% expansion in monthly real GDP in October and the surprise 0.1% growth in November, we managed to avoid going in to recession. So not in recession (yet), so no “real, severe consequences” in that sense because they don’t exist. But good start Bob, well done.
“If you’re the UK and you have an incredibly educated workforce with a lot of technical talent, places like Cambridge where the best AI and machine learning is, I would think you’d want to embrace a transaction like this where you’re going to see job creation and opportunity. It really isn’t at all about Sony or Microsoft’s platform, it’s really about the future of technology,” he continues.
Microsoft has Rare, Ninja Theory and Playground Games under their umbrella in the UK, but they’re also currently in the process of culling 10,000 jobs. Let’s also not forget that they shut down Lionhead Studios back in 2016, while Activision no longer has any UK studios after shutting down Bizarre Creations in 2011, flogging Swordfish Studios to Codemasters in 2008 and FreeStyleGames to Ubisoft in 2017, and opening then closing Activision Leeds between 2011 and 2014.
Bob then goes on to evoke the words of our glorious leader, Dishy Rishi. “Rishi Sunak has said they’d like to be the Silicon Valley of Europe or of the continent,” he said. Erm, Europe is the continent? Never mind, carry on Bob. “If deals like this can’t get through, they’re not going to be Silicon Valley, they’ll be Death Valley.” Ouch. I know we had a really, really hot summer last year but that was uncalled for.
“The best companies in the world right now are companies like Tencent and ByteDance, and these are companies that all have protected markets. We’ve struggled to enter the Japanese market, we can’t enter the Chinese market without a joint venture partner, and so the competition actually isn’t European companies, American companies, it’s really those companies in Japan and China,” continues Bob.
Actually you can enter the Chinese market without a JV, you could have a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise (WFOE) or a Professional Employer Organisation (PEO). But hey, who cares about facts?
As for the CMA, Bob seems to think they need a little education:
“The FTC, the CMA and the EU don’t know our industry, so they’re trying to come up to speed and fully understand the industry better. I don’t think they fully understand it’s a free-to-play business, that the Japanese and Chinese companies dominate the industry with Sony and Nintendo who have these huge libraries of intellectual property… I think [the regulators] are a little bit confused as to where competition is today,” he states.
The sass was echoed in an official statement from Activision Blizzard:
“We hope between now and April we will be able to help the CMA better understand our industry to ensure they can achieve their stated mandate to promote an environment where people can be confident they are getting great choices and fair deals, where competitive, fair-dealing business can innovate and thrive, and where the whole UK economy can grow productively and sustainably.”
Well that sounds just lovely, doesn’t it.
Source: GI.Biz
Andrewww
Sounds like he’s getting more and more desperate for this deal to go through… ?