Gamescom, Activision Blizzard, and Microsoft's history of acquisitions | This Week in Business

25.08.2023 - 15:03 / gamesindustry.biz / Zack Snyder / Geoff Keighley

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 back every Friday for a new entry.

Between Gamescom, the latest dramatic twist in the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition story, and new hardware announcements from Sony and Atari, it was a really big week for games news.

Okay, the new hardware announcements is just me desperately trying to come up with a third thing to justify it being a really big week for news. We'll get to those briefly in a little bit, but to start with, we can mosey through those first two actually big bits of news we saw this week.

STAT | 2 hours, 2 minutes, 51 seconds – The length of Tuesday's Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase event.

STAT | 3 – The number of new games shown during that time: Little Nightmares 3, Killing Floor 3, Thank Goodness You're Here. A game tie-in for Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon film was also announced, but not shown.

It's been a bit of a rough patch for new games in Geoff Keighley-run showcases.

STAT | 10 – The number of new games announced during the two-hour Summer Game Fest event in June, a number that was already low enough to raise eyebrows.

What's with the shortage of game reveals? I suspect a few overlapping reasons, pretty much all of which are outside the event organizers' control.

For one, Summer Game Fest and Opening Night Live are close enough to one another that there aren't many games that would be ready to reveal at the latter that weren't ready in time for the former. And if you just want to maximize eyeballs, the thing that used to be E3 is probably going to be more appealing to you than Gamescom. (As of this writing, the official Game Awards YouTube stream of Summer Game Fest 2023 has 3.5 million views compared to Opening Night Live 2023's 1.4 million. Even if we gave ONL a couple more months to make it a fair comparison, I would be surprised if it approached Summer Game Fest's total.)

Beyond that, you've got the same stew of industry trends that eroded E3 so much over the years. Publishers and platform holders increasingly save their biggest reveals for when they will have the stage all to themselves, and the ever-increasing production values of AAA games means fewer actual blockbusters to be revealed. I wouldn't be surprised if a rash of layoffs and belt-tightening around the industry from earlier this year also may have cancelled or backburnered some games that would have been prime candidates for a reveal this summer.

And then there's just the part of this that might be a bit coincidental, foreshadowing a possible dry spell of the sort one might