Activision Blizzard Exec Says Last of Us HBO Proves Microsoft Acquisition Should Go Ahead

Sounds like this person is becoming mad desperate

Biggest yawn fest ever this whole debate.

Win it, lose it, just get it over with.

Someone is desperate.
A TV show is not a game. But, nice try.

isn't she the union buster ABK hired?

When I saw people QRTing this earlier, I did not realize until this article they were an executive or anyone in any place of actual importance and they were being dunked on because it was a stupid take.

I notice MS and Activision have been making some rather intellectually dishonest or outright falsehoods to push this through (saying things like the FTC shouldn't exist then backing down when pressure was applied by the FTC, lying about timed exclusives as being full, saying Bloodborne is being "blocked" by Sony for release on Xbox etc) , so I guess I shouldn't be shocked.

LMAO, make better games then.

While she has a point in saying that Sony is not really at risk even if the acquisition goes through, trying to ‘sway’ the FTC by the success of a TV show based on a Sony IP that isn’t even being primarily produced by themselves it’s just ridiculous…

@Dragonsmana Sony has also been caught lying to the FTC, honestly this whole thing is a s***show for everyone involved, I just want it to be over no matter the result.

To see someone of such high position conducting herself this way is weird.

Christ. Whoevers married to this lady must have an exciting life. She must be a nightmare to have an argument with.. haha

That Lulu Cheng is a really weird woman. And I think quite desperate haha. She needs to throw less nonsense on Twitter.

@IOI
What's the lie then? Do you have a source?

With the money and studios MS already has its pretty telling they still cant make amazing games, just ok ones. Solution to this problem? Throw more money to buy more developers to make more just ok games... Getting to be a bit of a joke.

I fail to see how the success of The Last of Us TV Series corelates to why the ABK deal should go through, seems like a desperate attempt to grasp at straws.

Hypothetically speaking; imagine if the Halo TV Series was as successful and well-received as The Last of Us TV Series currently is, and The Last of Us TV Series was the one that wasn't as successful or well-received as the Halo TV Series currently is, and Sony used the Halo TV Series as a reason why the ABK deal SHOULDN'T go through, people would be looking at Sony like 'What the hell does that have to do with anything?'.

@OmegaStriver Lol the internet just brings out people's weird side. Gone are the days you'd hardly hear anything from your favourite celeb, now they're all over Twitter talking weird. 😁

She’s putting in a lot of effort just to be laid off by Microsoft

So on the one hand they are admitting that Sony is better.

On the other hand they are comparing a this HBO series to a franchise that has sold nearly half a billion copies and regularly sells 25-30 million more annually? Yeah, okay. Lolz...

You're not making the point you think you are. Just desperation. I know you're after a huge payday from Microsofts buyout but this really isnt it..Haha.

Just make better content then. It's not like you're lacking resources.

At this point, it's pretty obvious that Microsofts just sucks at video games, no matter how many studios they acquire.

I think to me the funniest takeaway from this is that Halo, Microsoft's flagship game IP, got its own TV show not so long ago and this tweet indirectly calls it worthless pretty much.

"look Sony's better than us! They're smarter, sexier, have better clothes and put the cereal first before the milk so for the love of god, let us buy Activision!"

Talk about desperation

Desperate stuff that makes no sense at all. Theres plenty of cogent arguments for the deal being approved, but this is definitely not one of them.
.... And the console market leader continues to be nintendo by a huge margin, thus showing she has absolutely no grasp of what shes talking about...

Can someone insert the - Jackie Chan what? - image?

@Nepp67 Mad desperate for that big payday when the deal does through

Something tells me she didn't make the debate team in high school. One of the worst arguments I've ever read. Truly embarrassing...

She has a point, Xbox, even after 20 years with the backing of a trillion dollar company, isn't able to rise above the third place.
They should be able to buy their success to compensate for their lack of quality and capability to manage game studios and the creative people that work there. Acquisitions will help (in the short term) until the creatives are fed up and move on.

@Gaia093 Basically. But it not surprising. Microsoft also basically called all their own studios worthless a while back as reason for the buyout to happen.

“ Sony "continues to dominate" the console market,” is a straw man that is barely relevant to the acquisition, as he knows. MS don’t care about plastic boxes sold, they have been telling us that for a long time. They don’t even count this as a metric in their investor reports.

Thank you, Phil!

But our Activision is in another castle!

What a bizarre argument "Sony are a great company and they're doing great and their franchises are all doing great"

If anything, this argument seems to suggest that Sony would do a much better job of taking over Activision Blizzard

In gaming she says sony is first of us, so whats her point about the TV show? She proves nothing about how sony will fare in the gaming market without Activision just because they've had one hit tv show 😂

Only thing she proves is how desperate they are and shows that they aren't confident at all.

How dare Sony make a quality show that is almost universally enjoyed, that's not how a large company is suppose to behave lol.

I think the abject failure of the Halo TV show to be any good at all shows that MS should be stopped at all costs from buying anymore studios.

They said the Ftc protection.... that sentence right there should sound the alarms. Smh.

@Toypop not sure if sarcasm or not. Usually there's a funny ending to sarcasm even if it's not on the nose....hmmm

I'm sorry,did I miss the part where Sony has deep pockets in having dominated the PC Operating system scene for decades now, has transitioned its dominance in its Office suite to mostly being subscription based (vs buying it outright anymore),nevermind its presence in Azure/Cloud services?🤔🙄

There's been a couple or more Halo spin-offs, so by her standards shouldn't that rule them out too?!😅
The "Xbox/Microsoft is just a small indie startup" is getting a bit ridiculous...this is all about getting Bobby Kotick's management tanking Activision's value bailed out on a nice Microsoft funded golden parachute.🙄

Wow a garbage take on Twitter, that’s a first. Someone needs to fire this lady considering she posts this much cringe.

This saga really needs to end.

Maybe if the show generates so many fans that Factions absolutely blows up in popularity whenever it releases then I could kind of see where she is coming from. However as popular as the show has turned out to be I doubt Factions is going to be making anywhere near COD numbers in terms of sheer profit.

It's not Sony's fault Microsoft was incompetent enough to release a botched Halo TV series.
Although I think anyone should've seen that coming since for the last 10 years they've been releasing botched Halo games.

Anyways, using TLoU tv series isn't a good example when you also have the Uncharted movie. A movie that was "successful" but failed to meet expectations, it barely hit the 400M box office mark.

What a crazy lady. Plus she completely forgot about the Halo show and the upcoming Fallout show, both properties Microsoft bought.

She is a bit deluded in her thinking but I guess we have to remember that Sony really are not innocent in this, Sony brought loads of big studios during the PS3 era we all loved this but many of us knew one day it would come back and bite us in the a**, this is just Microsoft playing catch up the only difference is Microsoft has way more money

Also in regards to this deal I think Microsoft will succeed as Sony has ***** themselves in the foot, Sony have been lying "Sony is briefing people in Brussels claiming Microsoft is unwilling to offer them parity for Call of Duty if it acquires Activision." Which isn't true as Microsoft offered them a 10 year deal, they have also said they will bring the cod games to Nintendo, so with Sony lying and the fact if the deal doesn't go through Nintendo won't get the games I don't think Sony will win this because essentially if MS wins Sony get the game AND Nintendo

Nobody mentions that TLoU HBO can be watched on an Xbox.

I was just considering this ongoing debacle and settled on the following conclusion. Microsoft believe they can Monopolise the market like they did for the OS/PC Market. If the Acti/Bliz deal goes through, they will likely go on an acquisition rampage, attempting to gobble up every 3rd party publisher out there. What I feel the Xbox Leadership fail to recognise is that the value of these studios is their people. Whether you're an Xbot or a Pony, you cannot deny there is an issue with the Xbox pipeline, it is sub-optimal at best. Titles that were marketed such as Perfect Dark show clear signs of trouble and key creative leads in both Playground and Arkane have left to form Indie Studios. If Microsoft can't demonstrate they can manage these acquired studios through to successful pipelines, I envisage a future where creative talent they thought they'd 'acquired' has moved on to either form their own independent studios, that Sony would then form relationships with and/or exclusive rights to their IP. The people working in these studios are not slaves, they are creative professionals with full autonomy. In short I don't believe the gaming industry is pay to win. Cases of this already exist, Deviant Games are former Activision employees having worked on COD and now have an exclusive IP deal with Sony, case in point.

@AverageGamer

I never thought that way hahaahhaha

Her argument, to me, makes as much sense as saying Sony can't compete in the OS landscape because MS makes Windows so they gotta buy Apple or something.

It's completely different mediums.

@Toypop why hasn't Xbox nurtured good exclusives as a priority then? Your point shows why it shouldn't go ahead. A company shouldn't just be able to buy everything because it can't handle the grassroots growth of developers since its creation. And the faith in studios that had made nothing much to make something massive is what Sony showed whilst Xbox just twiddled their thumbs saying "boo Sony exclusive"

Nothing has ever stopped Xbox from making their own great exclusives, apart from their own choices sticking with Forza and Halo and Gears, and plodding along. This is why it is fair business, at any point Microsoft could have backed a developer early and put the time and effort into creating great exclusive games with them.

But now they just want to hoover up established mega developers to do that instead. And that is more on the side of unfair business, as others can't really do that. And it will affect the competition, clearly, as that's partly why they want to do it.

@kyleforrester87 100%, you should meet my mate, no arguments can be won.. anything you say always has an answer. Not every comment you'll read is sexist.

Hahahaha.

She is funny….

She does obviously jest?

Sounds like a salty fanboy

@ the FTC???? Lmao so unprofessional.

No wonder some fanbases are so toxic

It’s a pretty ridiculous statement, sure, but it does have some semblance of logic. It’s just she didn’t really allude to the right logic. The skyrocketing sales of The Last of Us games is really more of the point. But even with the nice synergistic boost that TV is having on video game sales, it’s not even a fraction of Call of Duty sales, and COD doesn’t even need an HBO show to pull it along.

It’s just such a weird situation we’re in where each of the two companies is trying to downplay their own success and hype up the competition’s success. So strange, and completely counterintuitive in any other reality. It’s like Coca-Cola putting out tweets about how much better Pepsi tastes.

And it is a reasonable assumption that we haven’t had many big Sony Showcases or information about their first party projects because they don’t want to show publicly how well they might be doing or what good things are in the pipeline. Especially any first person shooters. If Sony really has SOCOM in the works, they’re hands are tied about saying anything until this stupid acquisition is final.

@Toypop
Nothing is stopping Microsoft from making games. Buying yet another publisher to make existing and popular IP exclusive is NOT the right answer.

@IOI No, she doesn't have a point at all. COD is the biggest gaming franchise and making it a console exclusive would unfairly tilt the market in Microsoft's favor. Remember she's a paid shill and her job is to argue a position regardless of the logic of that position. If Sony hired her tomorrow, she would be making arguments for why Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to by Activision Blizzard. There is nobibtellectual integrity here.

@TheCollector316 Microsoft buys great developers and then they produce terrible games. Perhaps the problem is Microsoft management.

Man, this must be like some form of "digital begging" -.-' Pathetic.

@get2sammyb as someone that thinks legally the deal should go through. I can’t make sense of this statement at all. I think it’s weird Sony has been caught lying to FTC and others, Microsoft was smart to subpoena them to court to get the facts in front of the judge. But this one just makes no sense to me and feels like a grasp that makes headlines online but in the court of law does nothing and probably won’t be brought up. The deal is going to go through, but i hope it’s sooner than later so gaming takes center stage of this Gen and not this case.

If you are trying to win over regulators this is not the tactic I would use. Such sensationalism and drama in the statement. She does have a point though. With that being said, Jim Ryan is doing the exact same thing but only behind closed doors, lining the pockets of regulators, crying that COD owned by MS is a Playstation killer while raising prices of consoles, games and keeping content from all platforms including PC.

And this is why that deal it's going to happen no matter what and also why MS won't buy anything big in Japan like SEGA. The things they have bought are things that were threw to them, MS didn't approach Bethesda or Activision, they approached MS to sell because thanks to their terrible management they were losing money and we can see that in this desperation.

Even if this acquisition doesn't happen as a hole I'm sure Activision is going to sell everything to them even if they have to do it by parts (like how SE sold their western studios). SEGA is doing great right now so they don't have the need to sell their game division.

Hot dang this still going on. Omg hurry IP I wana see Warcraft on me game pass.

Maybe if you hadn't gone so off the rails with your Halo TV show and made it NOTHING like the games it would also be a bit of a powerhouse. Oh and stop turning your games into live service garbage while you're at it.

@naruball
It's almost as bad as when I tried to convince my cousin I was born a Pelican.

@Ambassador_Kong
They have a track record of destroying their own IPs and paying for third party exclusives. Which ironically, they accused Sony of doing. Which although true, they've done it themselves.

Is she alright ?

How does HBO licensing an IP from Sony for a tv show, have ANYTHING to do with a proposed monopoly via buyout, by MS.. ?

I'd say "Go home, Activision, you're drunk!" but....I mean that's kind of the point, isn't it? We knew that already. That's why they're looking to be bought out....

another shill paid off by the dirty microsoft cash haha.

Microsoft is an IP graveyard.

@Ambassador_Kong CoD will not be exclusive, and even if it were Sony would have more than enough resources to build a competitor, but again, it won’t be exclusive, the very same thing people said about Minecraft that ‘evil Microsoft’ would take it away from every platform other than Xbox and it didn’t happen.

@TommyNL Sony has been saying to EU regulators that Microsoft is unwilling to offer parity in their 10-year deal which is kinda hypocrite since they’ve been paying Activision to not offer parity with the Xbox version and make some exclusive content for PlayStation, but more importantly, that statement is just not true as MS has been crystal clear in offer parity with every platform (including Nintendo and Steam) and even willing to let Sony put CoD in PS Plus, so that’s just a lie.

I’m not going to engage in the debate of whether Microsoft should be allowed to buy ABK or not cause I genuinely don’t care, I’m just saying it’s an ongoing s***show for every party involved with all the straight-up lies and stupid arguments such as this.

Kinda funny watching MS try to play dead.

Their argument is basically "we really suck".

I would prefer they don't buy Activision/Bliz, because...

MS doesn't get good games out, they just put Devs to sleep.

It's kind of funny how many people are replying to this article assuming big, bad Microsoft is the source of this and not noticing it's Activision, the irrelevant self-destroyed company looking for a payout from MS making it very obvious why they're in a position they need to sell out....

I do believe that this acquisition is a threat not only to Sony, but to the games industry at large. To be honest though, if you take a wider perspective and consider the entertainment industry as a whole, the lady kinda has a point.

In fact, I was just thinking that the TLOU TV show exposes how far ahead of Microsoft Sony truly is. This intermedia exploration of IPs has been poorly done with very few exceptions until now. And TLOU might not be another one of those exceptions. Sony is indeed exceptionally well positioned to do this in a way that few others can.

Twisted Metal, GOW, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima and other movies and TV shows are already in the oven. The mobile gaming initiative is also underway. If done rightly, all this combined could actually turn Sony into a mainstream entertainment monster.

of course they're desperate. Microsoft wants all of the already successful IP they can wall off and Activision/Blizz leadership want a. payday and get bailed out of the HR nightmare they're facing in California courts

The most stupid justification ever! How come that a short-term success for a TV adaptation of one company could justify the rival to go and buy a 3rd company? How about MS success in Windows and Office to allow Sony to buy EA for example?

It's better to remain silent and be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

@SolaceCreed almost!

@Saitama117 Twitter is the public square for humanity's bout with mental diarrhea...

Somebody is worried they might not be getting paid that big bonus when takeover time is complete

You know it's bad when even Xbox fans call out this post lmao. I don't think any one is actually siding with her on this comment...