Wagner James Au / New World Notes

This is one of those surprised/not surprised news items:

Microsoft Corp. plans to acquire Activision Blizzard Inc. in its largest deal yet as it looks to boost its gaming business and capture opportunities in the metaverse… “Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms,” Chief Executive Satya Nadella said in the release. 

The deal definitely makes sense for Microsoft's gaming war chest, but talk of the metaverse makes me wonder if Microsoft actually grasps the concept. (I mean if I were head of Microsoft's metaverse strategy, I'd spend less time trying to acquire legacy old school game companies, and more time updating and rebooting Microsoft's Minecraft into a full-fledged metaverse.)

And yes yes, Activision Blizzard has a great track record of creating hugely successful mass market games (good relations with its employees, not so much) with highly polished UX and deep narrative/world building. What Activision Blizzard is not especially well known for is the key feature that comprises any metaverse platform worth the name:

User-generated content. Blizzard's World of Warcraft is nearly as old as Second Life, and still hasn't added a player housing option — basically the bare minimum of enabling and encouraging UGC. Even beyond a lack of user creation tools, Activision Blizzard games are famous for being tightly controlled experiences, pleasantly pigeon-holing gamers into the heavily designed experiences and character types the studio has created for them. (If the real world analog to the metaverse is Burning Man, then Activision Blizzard is Disneyland.)

I guess the best case you could make for Activision Blizzard vis a vis a metaverse strategy is Microsoft can now create a truly polished user experience for a Microsoft metaverse platform that's appealing to core/mid-core gamers. Then again, the current leading contenders in the metaverse platform race — Fortnite Creative, ROBLOX, and Free Fire to some extent — already have larger userbases than all of Activision Blizzard's games.