On the one hand, it does make sense for Netflix to get into game streaming. They’re a one-product company with an insane degree of market penetration. In order to grow their business, they need to find new revenue streams. Given their broad data center presence, something like game streaming makes sense.
On the other hand, it made a lot of sense to Google too. They also have a crazy number of data centers streaming things like YouTube (and general Google shit), and from what I understand they’ve been working on game streaming for near a decade at this point. Amazon, too. We know they’ve been looking hard at games since 2014 since they bought Double Helix. And they literally are AWS, and they “know media” via running Amazon Prime Video.
Again, look who they hired: an ex Zynga/EA exec and a person who worked on VR content for Oculus. Does that sound like the executives you’d hire to build out the multi-billion dollar game streaming initiative that you’re intending to be the second pillar for your business?
As someone who works in M&A, those kinds of “on deck” projects simply get priced into the transaction. Like, if I’m going to purchase CDPR and they’re about to release The Witcher 4, I’m going to pay more for the company prior to the release of Witcher 4 than I will after Witcher 4 has released and the sellers have collected / extracted the sales revenue.
And if there’s some great contention about how much Witcher 4 will make (seller says it’s going to sell a lot, and buyer doesn’t think it will sell that much), we’d negotiate a purchase price that excludes the value of Witcher 4 and it’s revenue stream and then draft an earn-out agreement that pays the seller more or less depending on how well Witcher 4 does.
But at the end of the day, you should roughly get to the same overall purchase price you would have got to if, in negotiating a deal that includes Witcher 4, you has assumed it would sell a much as it did end up selling. (Sellers probably get more money overall in the earnout scenario because they’re taking on the risk that it might underperform expectations, whereas without the earnout buyers bear the risk of underperformance.)
Ghost of Tsushima is going to have own film and Netflix has multiyear, exclusive first pay window licensing deal in the U.S. for theatrically released SPE feature films, beginning with their 2022 film slate, incl. Uncharted.
HP stuff is a bit of a minefield because Rowling is radioactive and every time the game gets press it becomes controversial again. As this gets closer to release, the number of articles and discourse about this is going to magnify. It’s difficult to tell ahead of time how much of a problem this might be for WBIE and consequently how much of a problem it might be for a prospective WBIE buyer. It could be a storm in a teacup or it could actually blow up into major, constant negative press.
Avalanche (Harry Potter / WB) has also recently had a major departure because if this wasn’t bad enough, the lead designer ran a youtube channel that ranted and raved about “SJWs ruining gaming” and this was uncovered recently. He quit rather than wait around to be fired but this is not a good sign for the game or the media coverage surrounding it.
Considering the controversy surrounding the movie Fantastic Beasts 3 and the probable boycott of said movie, I consider that the IP of Harry Potter is going to be very, very devalued and that will reduce the value of Avalanche.
And?.. rotten scores don’t matter when people can simply watch it from home. Check the amount of scores most Netflix shows have but get renewed for multiple seasons because of viewership interaction
also the film was the subject of a controversy…and the result is that the numbers of previews are not encouraging. The snyder cut had 1.8 million views and the projected numbers are below a million.
Viewing numbers for a movie and the total lack of relevance to the gaming sector of WB make this off-topic. Please take this derail to a more appropriate thread.
Considering that Warner will close the merger in 2022 it may be some of the big Japanese studios (I am firm with SEGA). Avalanche or IOI are more plausible. Nor do I rule out Arc System Works
