Bobby Kotick Says UK Will Become 'Death Valley' If Microsoft Purchase Isn't Approved - Kotaku

Appearing on a CNBC business segment, Kotick begins the interview in a fairly sedate, level-headed way, talking about the uncertainties in the video game industry and the economy as a whole.

“I don’t think they fully appreciate that it’s a free-to-play business, that the Japanese and Chinese companies dominate the industry.”

“You look at Sony, you look at Nintendo, they have these huge libraries of intellectual property.

He then says the biggest companies in the world are now Chinese operations like Tencent, who enjoy “protected markets”, and cites Activision’s own “struggles” to enter the Japanese market as proof that the real competition in the video game space today isn’t between American and European companies (ie, the ones they’re trying to merge) but them and the Asian giants.

Like how Sony Studios might be useful occasionally for stuff like Spider-Man, but is also full of movies like like Basic Instinct and Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

If you’re the UK, and you have an incredibly educated workforce, you have a lot of technical talent, places like Cambridge, where the best AI and machine learning is, I would think you would want to embrace a transaction like this, where you’re gonna see job creation and opportunity, and it isn’t really at all whether it’s Sony’s or Microsoft’s platform, it’s really about the future of technology and you know they’ve said now for the last year...that would like to be the Silicon Valley of Europe, or of the continent, and if deals like this can’t get through, they’re not going to be Silicon Valley, they’ll be Death Valley.