Johnny Awesome
Veteran
I agree that anything over $5B is too much. MS should buy 4-5 other studios instead. 
Microsoft rumored to be buying...... [2020-04, 2020-07, 2020-11]
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It would be incredibly difficult to make the money back if someone paid billions for a game company. If the said company makes a game every 4 years and every game is a hit making some 250million profit after discounting employee+space+marketing costs even 1B$ acquisition would take 16 years to be at +-0.
For reference sony paid 177M£ for insomniac games. Maybe MS should look for talented people and small talented studios, buy them out with fair price. Then give those studios good funding to allow hiring and expanding as needed. It's tough to create new IP but that can and must be done.
edit. Link to insomniac acquisition price: https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/11/sony-paid-177-million-cash-spider-man-developer-insomniac-12220244/
For reference sony paid 177M£ for insomniac games. Maybe MS should look for talented people and small talented studios, buy them out with fair price. Then give those studios good funding to allow hiring and expanding as needed. It's tough to create new IP but that can and must be done.
edit. Link to insomniac acquisition price: https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/11/sony-paid-177-million-cash-spider-man-developer-insomniac-12220244/
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Well that's what the first 15 studios MS bought are for.
That's only a problem for list wars. There will be more xbox users in 2025 or 2026 that will enjoy a bounty of games vs those in 2020/2021. MS needs enough content makers to have new content hitting game pass every month or every other month to keep gamers subscribed. Using 3rd party content to fill the game is fine to a point but then a company may want to get that money for themselves like EA with their store front and subscription service. Big companies like CDPR don't mind putting on a 5 year old game like the witcher 3 but how long will it take for cyber punk to come to game pass ? By that point the buzz around the game will be gone. But for every game MS can have launch on it day and date the more people start to look at it as a great purchase.
I thought Blow had something seriously against MS. Something he had difficulty with early and MS was far from helpful. Something he still carried around with him.
D
Deleted member 11852
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Expected yes, but nobody knows how much Cyberpunk 2077 will sell and the company has not posted guidance on this. So it's guesswork. Personally, I'd rather wait it out and see what the sales are. If they're good or better than good, then wait for the dividends to roll in.
cheapchips
Veteran
Blow sees writing his own engines as a fundamental thing. He wrote his own programming language. He's that sort of programmer. It doesn't seem like a good fit for Xbox's not so close to the metal platform.
So what platform does he write them for, Windows PC which is further away from the metal than consoles?
cheapchips
Veteran
So what platform does he write them for, Windows PC which is further away from the metal than consoles?
hmm, good point. What was I trying to articulate again, 'cos danmed if I know??
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I’m an advocate of ms buying talent rather than companies. Hire producers and leads and allow them to start their own development groups with the ability to directly profit off the success of their titles.
Companies are only as good as their talent and talent can easily depart for other developers especially if they have no skins in the game other than a salary.
Buying companies is only worth it when you are after their IPs. Buying Warner Bros makes sense if it comes with lengthy licenses for the IPs they currently own.
In that case if I were MS I would allow WB to support all the hardware they currently do. But give Game Pass subs instant access and make streaming exclusive to GP.
It would allow MS to capture revenue from all the hardware WB traditionally supports while still creating justification for console gamers to support the Xbox hardware.
Companies are only as good as their talent and talent can easily depart for other developers especially if they have no skins in the game other than a salary.
Buying companies is only worth it when you are after their IPs. Buying Warner Bros makes sense if it comes with lengthy licenses for the IPs they currently own.
In that case if I were MS I would allow WB to support all the hardware they currently do. But give Game Pass subs instant access and make streaming exclusive to GP.
It would allow MS to capture revenue from all the hardware WB traditionally supports while still creating justification for console gamers to support the Xbox hardware.
Companies can buy stocks but there are restrictions regarding that. A group of owners that are in control of the board of CDPR could use stock buybacks in some kind of scheme to delist the company, but that would be illegal.
Companies are ultimately owned by people and it is the owners that decide what will happen to the company.
D
Deleted member 11852
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Only if the owner of the shares want to sell. Money can buy a lot of things, but it can't buy something that somebody does not wish to sell.
Actually it’s not illegal. When a company decides to go private, it has to offer a buyback period in which it buys shares at a price available to all shareholders. Company can use a private equity company who uses debt to finance the buyback. All the company needs to do during the buyback is shrink the shareholders under a certain limit to allow the company to delist. If the number of shareholders are still too large, it will do a reverse share split. For those shareholders that don’t hold enough shares to garner a full share after a reverse split, they are paid in cash. Once the company is delisted, it is essentially private.
You are essentially a shareholder of a private company with little chance of getting a return of your investment that was offered during the buyback period. Remember your shares’ value isn’t directly based on the value of the company. It’s based on what what the market dictated when the shares were available on a stock exchange. And that’s only in the case where there is no bring-along provision that forces minority shareholders to sell.
Unless you are a major shareholder, whose is willing to go to court, it is basically an waste of your investment and time to fight privatization of a public company.
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
The key is that the buyback share price has to be high enough to convince enough people to sell their shares back to the company. The company can't force shareholders to sell them their shares. If enough major shareholders don't wish the company to go private then there may not be a reasonably high price that the company can offer to get enough shares to delist.
Imagine, for example, how high Apple would have to set their buyback share price if they wanted to go private? It'd likely have to be significantly higher than the going share price...like a LOT significantly.
Regards,
SB
Imagine, for example, how high Apple would have to set their buyback share price if they wanted to go private? It'd likely have to be significantly higher than the going share price...like a LOT significantly.
Regards,
SB
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Sure in very rare circumstances there may be wording that a shareholder must sell their share back to the company due to X specific circumstance. But it's quite rare, even more so that the wording specifies delisting as a reason.
A merger or sale could be a reason but even in that case it generally requires stockholder approval of the merger/sale which could then trigger forced buyback.
Regards,
SB
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