Activision Blizzard: What Microsoft Got for $69 Billion

Jason Schreier is the author of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment and a reporter at Bloomberg. In this podcast, Schreier joined Motley Fool host Ricky Mulvey for a conversation about:

• The magic that made Blizzard Entertainment.
• The state of the video game industry.
• Why Grand Theft Auto VI is taking so long to develop.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner’s guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Oct. 26, 2024.

Jason Schreier: Microsoft Xbox specifically is facing some issues, and I wouldn’t be shocked, like, I don’t know, this is speculation, but, I would not be shocked if some of the folks who run the team there wish they could take a Mulligan on this particular acquisition.

Ricky Mulvey: I’m Ricky Mulvey, and that’s Jason Schreier, the author of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. He’s also a reporter for Bloomberg. Schreier joined me for a conversation about his book, the history of Blizzard, and the current state of the video game industry. I enjoyed the book and the conversation, I hope you do too.

A major part of your story in the book is just how difficult it is to make a really good video game. It seems like there’s two things sort of colliding in the industry right now, where it’s almost never been easier to make a basic video game. I think Mike Moheim in a conversation you had with him a few weeks ago, said, 15,000 new games were released on Steam last year and yet it’s never been more difficult to make a Blockbuster video game, where it’s taken more than 10 years to make Grand Theft Auto VI. What’s happening? Why is it so difficult to make big video games these days?

Jason Schreier: Think those two points are in conversation with one another because I think that the Blockbuster games, the games that are expecting to sell millions of copies at $70 a pop and are hoping to reach massive audiences, those are now competing with more games than ever before. Not to mention, the third part of this equation, and an important one is that a lot of games that have been released over the last decade or so are so-called games as a service, or as I like to call them forever games, games like fortnight, where you don’t just buy it and play it through and then put it down, you buy it, and you keep playing it for years and years and years. You combine all these factors, and you have these game companies that are trying to stand out, trying to make their games unique, trying to make their games feel different than competitors or at least look better than competitors. That’s tough and it’s really tough to stand out in this marketplace. A lot of people are struggling with that.

I think the graphical fidelity arms race is one of the biggest factors and one of the reasons that games are taking so long to make is that they’re getting prettier and prettier, and to hit that level of graphical sheen. You need more and more artists, more and more engineers, more and more designers working on your game. That just leads to more bloat and more time, and everything just takes a lot longer as a result. Whereas, if you are just a hobbyist downloading Unreal Engine or Unity Engine or any of these other tools that are free to download and play around with, you can make stuff in primitive art, and you can make it relatively quickly. Then you’re competing like the Blockbusters are seeing you as competition. A game called Undertale, one of the best games of the last decade. Like, looks like it could have been made in MS Paint. It’s a tremendous video game that undoubtedly is out there competing with some of the games made at $100 million plus budgets. Those two points are not as they’re less contradictory and more complimentary, I would say.

Ricky Mulvey: Are you seeing a reversion on the graphical sheen part, the really intense, high definition graphics, especially, you have a company like Nintendo, that continues to do extraordinarily well. They just released a new Legend of Zelda game. When I looked at the game play of that, it’s not a super intense graphic experience.

Jason Schreier: I think Nintendo has very smartly carved out that place in the market, reaching people who don’t necessarily care about the best graphics and the best-looking games. Really, I would say that, like, I think this graphical arms race is pretty misguided. I don’t think there’s a huge audience out there that is, like, demanding the best possible looking games, because these days, most games look pretty good. Like, graphics are generally pretty good. It’s rare to find a game that doesn’t look like at a baseline pretty good and so being able to see the pores on someone’s face while cool and a novelty, I’m not sure that’s what people are demanding with a couple of hours they have to spend playing games every single night.

You see Nintendo coming in and being, like. Hey, we don’t care about this graphical arms race. We just want to make games that are super cool and fun and innovative and interesting, which I think Nintendo’s got a pretty good track record for that, not all of their games are guaranteed hits, but many of them are. They have done extraordinarily well. The switch has sold 100-something million units. It’s done quite well, and it’s been on the market for almost eight years now. Sees it slowed down a little bit, but it’s still one of the best-selling consoles of all time.

Ricky Mulvey: From an outside perspective, I would expect these blockbuster games to, in some ways, be easier to make with tools like mid-journey and AI Copilots, where coding becomes easier when you have an assist, and then you can dictate what types of, you know, you can say, build a stadium, and you can do that without necessarily coding it. Is that true for these large-scale game developments, or are the AI leaps not as big as I would expect?

Jason Schreier: I don’t think the tech is there yet. By the way, it’s about 143 million units that the switch has sold as of a couple of months ago. I don’t think the tech is there yet for those AI tools and so I think to be clear, I think in the game development world, people have been using some level of AI tools for quite a while now. In using algorithms, that, for example, if you’re making a giant open world, if you’re making Grand Theft Auto, since you mentioned that earlier, you don’t necessarily need artists and designers to be hand placing every single rock and tree in that world. You can use algorithms that will look at the world and find realistic ways to place that topography. It’s not AI and as an assistant for game development is that new. The new LLM stuff and the generative AI. That I think is still, we’re still in early days on that stuff so it’s not really clear how that’ll impact game development, if it’ll actually be a help or a hindrance. One thing I can guarantee is that, like, video game fans and enthusiasts will not want to buy games that feel soulless, feel like they look like that AI slop that you see on Facebook, where it all just looks dead inside. I think people want to play games that feel like they were made by humans.

Ricky Mulvey: That have fingerprints on them. Let’s get into the book, which is a lot about sort of art meeting the cold realities of shareholder capitalism. The magic that made Blizzard, and one of the key parts of this magic was that Blizzard made hardcore gaming approachable. How did they do that practically?

Jason Schreier: It’s funny, Allen Adham, one of the co-founders of Blizzard used to call it Doughnut theory, where he described the hardcore gamers as the middle of the doughnut, and the ring of the doughnut was the more, like the audience of people who might buy a game every single year, the mid-core, he would call it, and he wanted to reach the entire doughnut, not just the middle of the doughnut. It’s interesting. I think they had a few techniques that they use, many of which are actually very similar to Nintendo’s. One of them is that every game should be extremely easy to get into, but really difficult to master and so they were really into the Blizzard folks, were really into making games that you didn’t need a ton of baseline knowledge to be able to pick up and play.

Something like Warcraft or Diablo, or StarCraft. Those are all games. These were Blizzard’s early games in the 1990s. Those are all games that really anyone could pick up and just with a little bit of guidance and tutorials, figure out exactly how they worked. Warcraft, for example, you have pretty simple, rudimentary characters on screen, and pretty easily, you figure out that you can click them, and then you can move them to another point, and you can use them to attack enemies, and then you can mind gold by sticking your worker units on that. It’s all pretty simple and straightforward. But, of course, beating other people in the game is much much more difficult. Blizzard was really good at roping people in and then keeping them hooked as they tried to figure out how to master the game. Like chess. Chess was the North Star for a lot of people at Blizzard. It was the game that they like to point to as the paragon of video games, the one game that is not of video games, but of games in general, the one game that is the model that you can follow as, like, easy to start playing nearly impossible to master. Then a little bit later, they hit the jackpot when they took that approach to a game called EverQuest, which was a popular, massively multiplier online game where you would inhabit this virtual world.

They were all playing that game. They were all hooked on that game and they looked at it and they said, God, we love EverQuest, but there’s so many things that annoy us about this game, like this super punishing death system and all these other things we don’t like about it. Why don’t we make our own version that is like, way easier to get into and more approachable and more fun to play? That’s in the World of Warcraft, one of the most lucrative games of all time.

Ricky Mulvey: World of Warcraft, you point out that in 2008, 11 and a half million people were paying monthly just to play World of Warcraft, and that, Azov had a larger population in countries like New Zealand, Norway, and Greece. To put some context on this, and this is an imperfect comparison because we’re doing one month to one week, but stay with me. The one-week viewership for the most popular show on Netflix was about nine million people. What was the timing and magic that made Warcraft so popular?

Jason Schreier: I think it was a bunch of things. I think it happened to come out at a time when a lot of people were I think people had been switching to broadband for a few years at that point. But by 2004, a lot of people were it was really in the center of the over the next few years, everyone would switch from dial-up to broadband. It was really at the apex of people adopting the Internet, the Internet was post.com blow up so people were recovering and viewing the Internet as a little bit more positively than they had at that point. I think there was a space in the market for that game. There were a lot of people who potentially wanted to play one of these online virtual worlds, these MMOs, like EverQuest or, like, Ultima Online or a few others at the time. But found them too opaque or too dense or just too impenetrable and World of Warcraft came out and it was just like. Hey, this is easy to jump into. Anyone can do this.

Then it was it built up a bunch of different factors. Another factor, of course, was at this point in 2004, when World Warcraft came out, Blizzard was a pretty well-established entity. It had a lot of fans at this point, thanks to StarCraft and Warcraft and Diablo and Diablo II each of their games before World Warcraft had just been bigger than the last, and they had all been massive hits. It was a pretty well-established company at that point. Then the other thing that happened with the World of Warcraft is that as it started to pick up steam, people started to talk about it, and it built up a natural virality, where there were all these events. It had a massive viral video, Leeroy Jenkins, which has been quoted by like, how I Met Your Mother and on Jimmy Fallon and stuff. There was the South Park episode that hit about it in 2006. That was really one of the points. I think that the peak pop culture phenomenon point of World of Warcraft was getting an entire South Park episode dedicated to it, which I think brought that game. The episode, I detail this in the book.

The episode was put together in conjunction with Blizzard who helped them make in-game videos. Each of the kids on South Park got their own characters. It was pretty cool and pretty well done. Then, yeah, from there, it just took off, ’cause, like, once you hit this point of virality with an online game, people just tell their friends to come play because they don’t want to play alone, and it just can build up, like, a snowball into an avalanche from there.

Ricky Mulvey: In the early days, in the mid-days of Blizzard, what’s an average Tuesday looking like for a game developer? What’s it like working there?

Jason Schreier: It’s funny. I think that, in a lot of ways, it feels like going to college. I think a lot of people you go on campus. This is so around 2007 or 2008, they moved into their big campus in the middle of Irvine, California, which is where Blizzard has always been based, and their campus is the right word for it. Imagine one of the big tech company campuses. That’s essentially what they had. It’s this big 250,000-square-foot location. There’s volleyball courts and a bunch of buildings and a gym and all sorts of other stuff you would expect from a tech company. Everyone there is like, you’re wearing your Blizzard logo hoodies and T-shirts, and you’re hanging out with your Blizzard friends, and you’re going and you’re working on a game, you’re coding, or drawing art, or designing, or testing for a game.

Then afterwards, you are going and hanging out with your Blizzard buddies. Maybe playing games with them, maybe playing Blizzard games with them. For a lot of people, that was a super fun environment for a lot of people who work there. I think making games in general can be a satisfying, rewarding thing, especially when you’re working on games that you know, many millions of people are going to play as in the case of Blizzard. For a lot of people, it was a dream company. Obviously, it had many problems. A lot of it should be exposed a little bit later on. But a lot of people enjoyed working there, and for a long time, it had really good glass door reviews and a really good reputation for people who work there.

Ricky Mulvey: Many of the people who works there took on what was called I don’t know if it’s what you called it or if it was what was called the Blizzard tax, where you’re knowingly taking five-figure pay cuts in order to work at your dream company. Going through this process of research and writing the book, did you find that the employees who took that tax worked their long term found that to be worth it?

Jason Schreier: It’s a good question. I think that some it depends which department you were in and when you were there. If you were there during the peak World of Warcraft years, which is like around 2006, 2007, all the way through 2010 or so and you were in certain positions, especially on that team, you might be getting bonus checks that outpaced your salary. You might be actually rewarded pretty well. Often the promise and the Blizzard tax, that was something that Blizzard people described it as, but it was something that, like it was like the condition here, the catch there, the contingency there was, like, you accept a lower salary for coming here. Yes, it’s true. But in exchange, or to make up for that, you will be getting profit-sharing bonuses, which is something that Blizzard at the time offered that a lot of companies didn’t.

For a while, that could be the case. Again, depending drastically, there were thousands of people at the company at this point in the mid-2000, so it really depended on where you were, which department you were in, and the system was very opaque by design, so not a lot of people knew how it worked or why they were getting certain amounts, and so on. That time was a little bit different than a little bit later when Blizzard started getting less of the profit sharing and ran into some fallow years. Suddenly that promise of, well, you’re going to take maybe an average or below average salary to work here, but you’re going to get profit sharing in exchange when that profit sharing was no longer all that impressive, then it became a much bigger problem for a lot of people. There were also, you’re in Orange County, California. That’s an expensive place to live and work. It’s really hard to work there without a good salary. Even with a six-figure salary, it’s difficult to buy a house in Orange County, California. Then on top of that, you have competitors in the area, especially Riot Games, the makers of League of Legends, which itself is based on a mod for a Blizzard game. Riot Games comes in, and they are well funded and paying, in some cases, double the salaries of Blizzard and so they poach a lot of people from Blizzard as a result.

Ricky Mulvey: You have these competing needs, especially on people getting paid there, where you have essentially profit sharing incentives for people who are making games that make money, but you also need people to experiment on new ideas and, fire bottle rockets that may or may not go off. There are a lot of games that have not made it to players’ hands, but one that was famous because it became Overwatch was called Titan. This was this superhero game where you were essentially mixing the Sims, where you have a daily regular life with a superhero game. They worked on this game for years and years, and they could never turn it into something that was releasable because of something you call basically the loop problem, the central loop problem. I didn’t understand this reading your book as much. Why is it a problem? It makes sense to me. You got Daily Sims, and then you got a superhero game, and you’re combining it into one. Why is that a problem for the game?

Jason Schreier: It was too much. There were too many things going on, too many different mechanics going on, and by Core loop, designers like to think of it in terms of, what is five minutes of this game going to look like? What is 30 minutes of this game going to look like? What is an hour of this game going to look like? If that experience doesn’t feel cohesive or fun, then that can be a problem. With this, in the case of Titan, all those mechanics just never coalesced. It might be fun in isolation to be doing the shooting part, and it might even be fun in isolation to be doing this other simsy part where you’re decking out, decorating your apartment or driving around the city or whatever. But together, they just didn’t work. It felt like this weird mishmash of games, and it didn’t feel like they were in sympotico in any way, and they just could never nail that core gameplay loop and that’s what people are describing when they talk about that. It just didn’t feel cohesive.

If something doesn’t feel cohesive, it doesn’t really last in the long run because you might be looking around and being like, why am I decorating this house? Why am I shooting these bad guys? This isn’t working for me. They played around with a lot of ideas to try to make that work, but it just never did. What ultimately happened, and what turned into the very popular game over watch was when they boiled it down. Essentially, Titan was canceled, a small team remained behind, and they had a chance to work on a new project. They said, hey, this shooting part, that was fun. Why don’t we take that and turn it into more of a hero shooter, like Team Fortress 2, and then just build that into a game? That worked really well and was developed in two and a half years. In large part because it had such a clear focus, and from the beginning, they knew exactly what that game play loop was going to be. They knew exactly what five minutes, 30 minutes, an hour of that game would look like. They knew it would be matches. They knew each match would have objectives. They knew it would be based on heroes, and then it was a matter of just building the game.

I think when you have a very clear vision, and everyone understands a lot of game developers often talk about not understanding what the game is, and that was very much a case with Titan, where if the people who are working on it every day can’t even understand what the game is, then players will certainly never understand that. That said, and I think it’s worth noting here. Some people, even on the team, even after six years of development, a lot of people believe that it would come together because sometimes with games, like things just take a while to coalesce, and it’s only once a certain feature is implemented or a certain graphical element gets turned on that you can really understand the game and get a good feel for it. In the case of tech, people still held at hope. It can be very difficult when you’re working on just your individual part of the game to know how things are going overall. But no, it just never came together.

Ricky Mulvey: Blizzard had a series of corporate parents. One of them was Activision. In comes this figure named Bobby Kotick, who you said he came out of the womb, basically looking to deliver shareholder returns. I’m sorry, I’m butchering the line. But one of the things that Activision was able to do. This is the company that was behind Call of Duty is release games on an annual basis with regularity, and for any financial analyst, they really like a regular financial model that they can plug games into, and they can plug the profit into, and then come up with that. Blizzard is the opposite of that, where they have wildly varying years of operating profit. Many of the tools that Bobby Kotick used to release games on a very regular basis at Activision aren’t able to work at Blizzard, and he doesn’t understand why. Why is it that Activision is able to release these games on an extraordinarily regular basis? Some of them are incredibly popular, Call of Duty, and yet Blizzard was not.

Jason Schreier: I think there are a lot of factors there. I think what Blizzard people would immediately tell you is that, they got Call of Duty. That’s a great franchise and makes them a bunch of money, but when’s the last time Activision incubated a new franchise, the way that Blizzard has incubated, like Hearthstone and Overwatch and other new franchises over the years. A lot of what Activision has created is just stuff that it bought. This is a company that understands how to churn, but not necessarily how to create at least from Blizzards perspective. Activision people will tell you, well, these blizzard people, they’re stuck in their ways.

They’re these artists who don’t care about commerce and this is the real world. We’re footing the bills for them to play around with these experiments like Titan that don’t actually work. They refuse to hire them many more people it would take to generate this content more quickly, and then blizzard people would fire back, well, we don’t want to hire hundreds more people because we don’t want to turn our games into sollice factories, the way the Call of Duty is. The Call of Duty organization within Activision is very much commercially driven. Marketing people and that org, the commercial org in general, sits at the very top, and other people feed into that, other parts of the organization feed into that. I think that was not a philosophy that worked for Blizzard. Blizzard was very developer focused.

It was very much like the most powerful people at Blizzard were the executive producers on each game team, they had a lot of say they had input into the marketing and could ultimately put their foot down if they needed to, so very different cultures. It was inevitable that the two cultures would clash in some way or another. On World of Orca, just to give you an example, one of the common arguments was that Activision executives would come in and they would say, hey, you guys only have X hundred people on this team. You need Y hundred, so X plus five or whatever, because we have these calculations on Call of Duty that show the man months it takes for each of these game to be made. Therefore, you must have more people, and so we are demanding that you hire more people, and that led to endless battles over the years.

Ricky Mulvey: We talked about it a lot on this show and the various regulatory challenges at one point, Warren Buffett was trying to play R games with it. We haven’t talked about it much since then. When Microsoft comes in, there’s this hope that a trillion dollar company is going to be able to really improve things. You have an engine that’s going to allow more resources to build more and better games. You have your regulatory challenges, and then what happens at first is you have Phil Spencer who runs Microsoft gaming, and he has this reputation that he’s going to let games develop. You know what? Maybe things can continue to take time to bake because Microsoft has a bunch of other products. The opposite turns out to be true. There’s layoffs in the Microsoft Gaming division as they are across the video game industry. What also ends up happening is they’re cutting into the bone, where they’re cutting developers. They’re not just cutting marketing teams or financial teams. What do you think Microsoft was originally hoping for with this Activision acquisition?

Jason Schreier: The most important part of this is that money looked much different in December of 2021 when Microsoft started talking about this deal and struck the deal a month later in January 2022, than it did in October of 2023 when the deal closed. The video game industry as a whole looked much different. When Microsoft made this deal, interest rates were at an all time low, the video game industry was still on that bounce from the pandemic when everyone was staying at home and playing games nonstop, and it hadn’t yet hit this correction point. The landscape was very different. I think their hopes at that point were dashed a little bit as the regulatory process dragged on and the economic climate and the entire video game industry just changed pretty drastically as a result. Nobody saw the growth that they wanted, and especially Xbox. Xbox was also in a very different position.

They were in a much stronger place because their Xbox game pass, which is their Netflix like subscription program, which is at the core of many of their video game strategies, that was still growing at that point, and it has since flattened and plateau. I think one of their hopes with this acquisition was that it would lead to more game pass growth, more console growth. A lot of that stuff has really slowed and led to them having to shift a little bit. Then the other thing that happened was that as a result of this acquisition, they suddenly we’re under a lot more pressure from Microsoft, and my colleagues at Bloomberg have reported that Phil Spencer, who runs Xbox has been under a lot more pressure from Satya Nadella and Amy Hood and the people who run Microsoft, because they’re looking down and they’re saying, hey, you guys spent $69 billion, you better get these PNLs in shape. You better get that growth up. As a result, they’ve spent this whole year cutting costs and looking for ways to boost revenue, laying people off, shutting down studios, cutting costs in other way, belt tightening all across the org. Then also releasing their games on Playstation, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Microsoft Xbox specifically is facing some issues, and I wouldn’t be shocked, I don’t know, this is speculation, but I would not be shocked if some of the folks who run the team there wish they could take a mulligan on this particular acquisition.

Ricky Mulvey: I’m uncertain, what’s being developed right now? Because I’ve seen some reports that they’re trying to develop a new franchise, but it seems like they’re just doing some expansions for World of Warcraft in Diablo. Almost a continuation of what was already going on at Activision Blizzard under Kotick.

Jason Schreier: Blizzard did have a new franchise in development. It was co named Odyssey. It was supposed to be a survival game, like Rust or Valheim, games like that. That was canceled earlier this year during the big Microsoft layoff in January. Nowadays, they’ve got some other incubation projects in the works and different franchises, StarCraft and Overwatch. But their main focus, and they’ve been public about this is focusing on their forever games, which they now have four of them, essentially, Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV, and World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, which all just have big teams behind them that are still working to get new content and new expansions out. That, I think is a large part of Blizzard strategy is just maintaining players for those games. Like the Diablo and World of Warcraft, both just had new expansions come out over the last couple of months. I expect we’ll see more of that in the future, as well.

Ricky Mulvey: 3, 5, 10 years from now. What would be your mark of success that this was a good acquisition for Microsoft taking Activision Blizzard?

Jason Schreier: That is a great question. I’m not sure what success looks like for them because their position in the console market is so tenuous. The Xbox has really been outsold by the playstation at least two fold over the last few years. Their position in the subscription market has also, while they’ve been dominant with Xbox game pass, it’s been flat, like I mentioned earlier. I think a lot more growth there would help. In fact, as we’re recording this, the new Call of Duty game is about to come out and that is launching day one on Xbox game pass, which I think Microsoft hopes will buoy subscriptions and lead to a lot of growth on game pass. That’s a big test. That’s a big milestone in this acquisition, and where it goes from here. I’m not sure. I don’t really know what that looks like and what their metrics for success are. I think, for Phil Spencer, I guess if he’s still in charge, 3, 5, 10 years from now, and he’s still running the division, then I guess it’s success for him because it means that the Microsoft higher up, see his position is still being tenable and still being successful. That might be one metric that we look at in the years to come.

Certainly, I’ll be looking at game past growth and what they say about that as well. Activision Blizzard, it’s a profitable company. Just buying it gives you a profit center. It’s just that $69 million, it’s a lot of cash.

Ricky Mulvey: I’m hoping this is a good headline grab. We need our viral moment, Jason. It’s December of 2025. I’ve turned on an Xbox, and I’m scrolling through games. Is one of them Grand Theft Auto VI?

Jason Schreier: I don’t know. I wish I could give you a headline on this. I think anything I say is just going to be taken out of conduct and extrapolated, for sure, so maybe you will get your headline. I really don’t know. They’ve said fall 2025. I am always skeptical when it comes to video game release dates, but especially Rockstar game release states, I feel like they’re always good for at least a couple of delays. I wouldn’t be shocked if it slips to 2026, but that’s not based on inside information. I just have no idea.

Ricky Mulvey: It’s one of this stories where the power of money doesn’t work. This is a game. When it came out in 2013, it made about $8.5 billion in revenue. For context for folks, that’s the worldwide box office for the top 10 movies in 2023 combined. Around the world, how many people went to theaters for the top 10 movies? That’s just Grand Theft Auto VI, a game that came out in 2013. How does this sequel? How does 5-6 take more than 10 years?

Jason Schreier: Well, I would actually argue that money is the precise reason why there hasn’t been a sequel, because GTA 5, not only did it make, I believe it was 800 million in revenue in its first 24 hours, so about 11,12 million in sales. It went on to have the longest tail of any video game in history. It is currently at about 200 million sales. That is because Grand Theft Auto online, the multiplayer component of that game was more successful than anyone could have possibly imagined. It is one of the most lucrative products ever made and has turned GTA 5 into the second best selling game of all time, second only to, I believe, Minecraft. We’re talking on Minecraft, that’s really sun phone, so apples and oranges here. We’re talking about a franchise where the last game has now sold, again, 200 million copies. That’s unheard of nothing. For some crazy context, that’s more than the entire Assassin Creed franchise has sold, the entire Assassin Creed franchise. Two hundred million copies of the single game, if not for that, so that did a couple of things.

That sucked up a lot of resources from the rest of the company to get people working on GTA online and continuing to make content for that, like how World of Warcraft did the same for Blizzard. That itself contributed to delays for GTA 6. Another thing was, of course, Red Dead 2, which trucks are released in 2018, most of their staff were working on that rather than GTA 6 for the five years between GTA 5 and Red Dead 2. Even though GTA 6 has technically been in development since around 2014 or so, it hasn’t really been in full scale development until a few years ago until recently. That’s a factor. But to Rockstar, I think there’s no rush to release a new GTA when your old GTA is printing money. I mean, GTA online. The numbers are just staggering, 200 million copies, once again, that’s outsold the entire final fantasy series, just as another example. The number of copies there is unfathomable, 200 million copies. That’s like half the population of America.

Ricky Mulvey: Jason Schreier, his book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. A book I’m happy to recommend to listeners of Motley Fool Money. I enjoyed reading it, learned a lot about the industry. Thank you for your time for your insight and for joining us on Motley Fool.

Jason Schreier: Thanks for having me Ricky.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don’t buyer sell anything based solely on what you hear. I’m Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back tomorrow.