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Comment by Firmwarrior | Hacker News Reader

If the US part has all the talent and all the profit, seems like that'd still be a pretty viable move, wouldn't it?

I don't think the US has all of neither, but especially not revenue. Asia tends to be the biggest market, with the US being the second and EU third. Usually, US has maybe half of the profits as the Asia counterpart, while EU has half of that.

So if the acquisition gets blocked in the EU, they'll miss out on a ton of revenue, for sure.

Not to mention the operational overhead of actually operating the machinery when the machinery is banned in the EU but not the US.

You can see that games in other highly populated regions sell for much less. This is the 7th most popular game on steam that isn't free to play.

https://steamdb.info/app/252490/

39.99 in the US, 22-23 dollars in China and India. In indonesia the game sold for as little as 13 cents a license. It is slightly higher in the EU and UK but by very little. In this case 24% of all players are American. The UK is 2%. So even with a slightly higher price, they're not getting anywhere close to the revenue that US consumers are generating. Russia has 10% of the player population and the game sells for 13 dollars. I don't think the population correlates to revenue when the game in nearly every market is going to see for less, or attract much less players.

According to sources gathered by Statista, Asia Pacific is the largest market for gaming: https://www.statista.com/statistics/539572/games-market-reve...

(in billion U.S. dollars)

- Asia Pacific - 87.9

- North America - 48.4

- Europe - 32.9

- Latin America - 8.4

- Middle East & Africa - 6.8

That’s not the question. The question is what share of revenue it is for Activision.

Edit: found the numbers here https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

Americas: 1,211

Europe and Middle East: 742

Asia Pacific: 381

Total: 2,334

So Asia is 16%.

> Usually, US has maybe half of the profits as the Asia counterpart, while EU has half of that.

But is this actually the case with Activision? Aren’t most of their games banned in China (this shrinking the Asian audience massively) and don’t they charge a lot less?

Some of Microsoft's top game development studios, specifically right now, Rare and Playground Games are based in the UK and contribute at least some of the profit and arguably a lot of talent.

(Microsoft has a really interesting history of UK game development teams, going way back, including ones they ultimately shut down such as Lionhead.)

One would think the US part owns all of the IPs as well.

Seems like the main thing of value at this point. It would be great to get rid of the toxic bureaucracy milking the IP.

Why would the US part ha e all of the talent? Are/were Activision's development teams based solely in the US? I thought they had devs elsewhere too.

Might make sense if their EU/UK offices were mostly admin.

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