Activision Blizzard buy MLG

[Xenoscythe]

[Album] Major League Gaming sold for $46 Million

[Steinzy]

Big move and interesting stuff... cheers for posting. Interested to see what Blizzard does with this because with such a huge backer it could be a great new addition to the events scene as MLG was lagging behind.

[DayC]

Big move and interesting stuff... cheers for posting. Interested to see what Blizzard does with this because with such a huge backer it could be a great new addition to the events scene as MLG was lagging behind.

Certainly is interesting, what I want to know is what assets did they specifically buy and if it's "substantially all" why wouldn't they go the whole hog and buy the company outright.

I suspect they'll use MLG as a platform to continue what little SC2 support was in place, establish a home for major tournaments Hearthstone and push the upcoming Overwatch franchise.

[Noodle]

if it's "substantially all" why wouldn't they go the whole hog and buy the company outright.

That will be due to technicalities. If they outright bought it, it becomes part of their company, so if the MLG flops which is still a possibility it will possibly affect the share prices of ActivisionBlizzard as a whole. The fact that haven't outright bought it show's that they don't have much faith in the product they are buying to me.

I'm sure @Steinzy know's far more about this kind of thing than I do though.

[Steinzy]

It's more likely that the deal was dictated to MLG, the stronger party (Blizzard) has the buying power to dictate an asset purchase for just the parts of the business they want as a "take it or leave it" deal. MLG would have preferred a 100% takeover but wouldn't really have been able to enforce this. However they would probably have been able to negotiate a better price for the assets Blizzard bought to slightly compensate them for this. Also when you buy a business you'd be also taking over the "intangibles" such as goodwill, brand, website etc which I doubt Blizzard would be interested in.

It could also be tax implications due to capital gains thresholds.

[Easy]

@Steinzy Lurppis (A csgo analyst) tweeted this:

lurppis (lurppis_)

Also looking at it very basically, if I were Bliz, buying MLG would allow me to:

Make money from Dota and CS:GO, as well as more from Call of Duty and whatever else they run.

And have a proven platform to do my esports stuff. The world is very much becoming a "Why do something yourself if someone else can do it, just buy them" place.

For example, Google trying to do live streams of games, cant compete with twitch. Amazon want to do it, buy twitch.