{"id":29362,"date":"2015-11-09T18:28:12","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T23:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=29362"},"modified":"2015-11-09T18:33:32","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T23:33:32","slug":"experienced-points-activisions-6-billion-candy-crush-gamble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=29362","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: Activision&#8217;s $6 Billion Candy Crush Gamble"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My column this week in all about how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/video-games\/columns\/experienced-points\/14937-Why-Did-Activision-Buy-Candy-Crush-s-King-for-6-Billion\">paying $6 billion for the Candy Crush developer was ridiculous<\/a>. As others have pointed out, Disney only paid $4 billion for Star Wars. And Star Wars has a lot more staying power than the latest fad game in a long line of match-3 clones. <\/p>\n<p>A couple of small points:<\/p>\n<p>Most of my argument is built on the idea that the mobile \/ casual<span class='snote' title='1'>We really need a better name for this. There&#8217;s nothing &#8220;casual&#8221; about the casual market. And &#8220;mobile&#8221; leaves out the web-based side of things.<\/span> market is a crapshoot. We have a repeating pattern of small-fry operations hitting it big, and giant companies who were unable to replicate previous successes.  We have yet to see the &#8220;Blizzard of mobiles&#8221;, where a single company turns out hit after hit. If King is miraculously that company, then this deal would start to make some kind of sense. <\/p>\n<p>The other thing is that apparently Activision had a huge pile of income overseas, but they couldn&#8217;t bring that money home without paying about a billion dollars of taxes on it<span class='snote' title='2'>This is based ENTIRELY on un-sourced comments. I haven&#8217;t looked into it yet.<\/span>. So this deal kind of represents Activision trying to get some value for that money, rather than seeing it vanish. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My column this week in all about how paying $6 billion for the Candy Crush developer was ridiculous. As others have pointed out, Disney only paid $4 billion for Star Wars. And Star Wars has a lot more staying power than the latest fad game in a long line of match-3 clones. A couple of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}