You are probably, right. The idea was to convey the slowness.
Anyway the point is from a pure acquisition perspective, where a range of IPs matter:
Rockstar is generally slow, I suppose (pedantic version). But it does not invalidate the point. You are spending 20-30bn for 2 IPs that release once every 7 years. There are other interesting IPs like Xcom, nba2k, civ, bioshock under Take Two - but I am sure the spotlight there is Rockstar’s IPs and Rockstar’s talent.
Yeah - that was striking. I am not sure how many they would own though.
If the worry is about the number of games produced by Take Twos studios, I think that you can be relieved of that concern a bit by their publishing department now working on pumping out games. Sure there may be a lot of indie titles there, but they certainly aren’t all indie games. We know for instance that they are publishing Moon Studios next game. They worked with Obsidian before too. They will lock in some big games that fill in the gaps and in sure if Xbox acquired them they would be takes with more of that.
Take two is not realistic, think smaller. Not only is it a public company, it is also worth significantly higher than what the biggest acquisition we have had so far which was around 8 billion by tencent. It also goes against what these aqcuisitions have been for, gamepass. They need a constant rate of games and take two will take a decade before they release a game
People talk about Square and Sony but in reality Take Two is way more realistic for Xbox than Square is for Sony so I don’t really see why it’s not worth discussing. Also as we were discussing, the publishing arm for Take Two is putting out 90 games over the next 5 years so that’s actually a ton of games and content for Xbox to go after.
Take Two isn’t just Rockstar, they have some of the most iconic names for PC as well with Civilization and XCOM. They also own 2k so that could give Xbox NBA 2k day 1 every year and they’d get Bioshock as well.
Take Two would probably end up in the $25 billion range, so in the same class as LinkedIn. A pretty hefty chunk of change but not impossible if MS wants to go all in on gaming. It is a rather large sum though.
Imagine the value add to Gamepass from a back catalog perspective as well. No way a service with the EA games, Bethesda, Take Two and Xbox isn’t an automatic must have. It becomes God Tier
If EA is willing to sell, it would most likely sell off it’s not-sports studios. EA Sports is the real moneymaker, with FIFA’s Ultimate Team Mode makes over a billion yearly (!). Throw on top of that gane sales and other sports games like Madden, they’ll be just fine.
DICE, Respawn, Criterion etc. are all good studios with good IP.
some video interview with Phil Spencer at some point in the future
Journalist: “So Phil, after the big news of Zenimax finally being folded into the Xbox family, do you see the company looking to make any further acquisitions toward publishers? Don’t you think one is enough?”
Phil unzips his blazer to show his new T-Shirt starring a Big Daddy
If the goal is reaching billions of gamers why would they even care about spending 50 billion. I really don’t think they would. Now I do think they care about making the smartest money moves to get there. To me Sega and Take 2 offer by far the most value on the market.
(I’m not saying I think T2 is plausible or desireable, to clarify)
Rockstar is the flagship, since GTA is an absolute titan and Red Dead is huge (although not GTA big). Max Payne and Bully are reasonably big but distant 3rd/4th after the Big Two.
2k Sports is pretty big but probably tied to multiplat.
2k games (outside of sports) has:
Bioshock (big)
Civilization (fairly big)
Mafia (fairly big)
X-Com (fairly big)
Borderlands (publishing rights on the 3 mainline games; possible right of refusal on future titles but unknown)
Private division is a small smattering of things, not very important. Kerbal Space Program 2 might be reasonably big. The Outer Worlds is still Private Division published.
Most of the valuation is unquestionably tied up in Rockstar, otherwise the company would be more like in the 5-8 billion range rather than the 20 billion range.
