What money can't buy

Good Morning. Week 3 of the NFL season is all wrapped up. While Usher was announced as the Super Bowl halftime performer, it was Taylor Swift who stole the show, making an appearance at the Chiefs game to cheer on Travis Kelce.

While Swifties X NFL might be the hottest cross-over right now, gaming has seen its fair share of pop culture collaborations this year, from Fornite live concerts to Nicki Minaj operator skins. That all begs the question — do we need a T-Swizzle edition battle pass?

— Tim Rhyne, Derek Neville, Jason Liu

MAIN QUEST: Capcom’s not for sale

Lately, growth by acquisition has been the name of the game for behemoths in gaming. The Microsoft leaks shed light on just how ambitious they’re thinking with their shopping list — even mentioning the likes of Nintendo. Through the controversy, Capcom’s COO has directly mentioned that they have no interest in being bought or buying any other publisher. Rather, they prefer to grow organically and lean on ‘equal’ partnerships.

Here’s a list of some of the blockbuster acquisitions of the past few years:

• Activision Blizzard by Microsoft ($68.7B — announced Jan ‘22)

• Zynga by Take-Two ($12.7B — 2022)

• Supercell by Tencent ($8.6B — 2016)

• ZeniMax (Bethesda) by Microsoft ($7.5B — 2022)

• King by Activision Blizzard ($5.9B — 2015)

Step back: Taking a look at the above 5 largest deals in recent history makes it clear that Microsoft’s pursuit of Activision Blizzard is truly unprecedented for its sheer size. Just to put things in perspective, the current market cap for Nintendo is around $55B — though the hurdle with snatching up Mario has never been an issue of cash.

HUD

• 📶 Following its troubled launch, which has been plagued by server issues, Payday 3 developers are now considering adding an offline mode to the game.

• 🔓 A ransomware group has claimed to have hacked “all Sony systems". The group claims that Sony has refused to pay and they will be selling the data. The legitimacy of the alleged hack has not yet been confirmed.

• 👋 AMD’s Scott Herkelman announced his departure from the company in a post to his X (Twitter) account. Herkelman serves as AMD’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Graphics Business Unit, overseeing the last 3 generations of AMD graphic cards.

MAJOR W

• ♟️ Over 1,100 new board games are expected to be showcased at SPIEL ‘23 in Essen, Germany next week.

• 🌠 Starfield’s latest patch fixed issues with items disappearing from the Razorleaf’s storage containers and weapon racks (it also patched the magic loot puddle in Akila City).

F IN THE CHAT

• 🧟 Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Day will not feature any updates on the TV series or future game plans.

• 💔 Unity fees fallout continues as smaller studios believe the trust has eroded beyond repair.

THIS DAY IN GAMING HISTORY

Command & Conquer was released in 1995. This game would go on to gain a 94% Metacritic score and become the original defining title of the real-time strategy genre.

CAREER CORNER

• HR Operations Coordinator — Unity (Vancouver)

• Technical Director — Bethesda (Rockville)

• FX Art Lead — Epic Games (Cary)

HIVE MIND

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