Activision Blizzard goes into the black box | This Week in Business

20.10.2023 - 15:49 / gamesindustry.biz

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

As you may have heard, Microsoft finalized its acquisition of Activision Blizzard last week.

I've used this space previously to talk about why I'm not a fan of the deal given Microsoft's historical abuse of its dominant position in operating systems and its behavior whenever any kind of governmental oversight threatens to rein in its business somehow.

Those concerns haven't changed and remain of primary importance, but there's a good chance you've heard me or plenty of other people complain about them already. So today I'm going to complain about something smaller, but still significant:

What this means for Activision Blizzard's investor relations website.

Wait, wait! Come back, let me explain!

Last year I did a clickbait listicle on The Top 5 Investor Relations Pages as a joke. Well, the premise of it being a way to attract traffic was a joke, but the praise I gave out to the companies involved was real.

Some companies run their investor relations sites like they don't want anyone to be able to find anything useful on them, while others are actually pretty upfront and transparent (relative to the rest of the industry), keeping a thorough archive of earnings reports, press releases, and all manner of little details that can be very helpful for a columnist who likes to juxtapose the professional facade of the games industry with the shockingly unprofessional nonsense that transpires at basically every level of this thing.

And as much as I give Activision Blizzard a hard time, I genuinely appreciate its investor relations website, which is living on borrowed time, as Activision Blizzard no longer has investors it needs to relate to.

Activision Blizzard's investor relations site is rationally laid out and features a wealth of financial information and preserved press releases dating back more than two decades.

It also demonstrates the company's commendable commitment to the historical record. I can only imagine the restraint/lack of shame it requires for the company not to have memory holed some of the stuff on there a long time ago.

QUOTE | "I couldn't be more excited at the prospect of being back in court to defend the makers of Call of Duty against this convicted murderer who wants to make a mockery of the US legal system and attack our right to free speech." – Rudy Giuliani in a bafflingly unnecessary press release about defending Activision Blizzard from a Manuel Noriega lawsuit over using the Panamanian dictator's likeness without approval.

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