Activision Blizzard’s strategy for world conquest

Activision Blizzard has become the No. 2 publicly traded game company in the world, second only to China’s Tencent. It has done so by being singularly committed to making the world’s biggest video game franchises and putting everything behind them. That’s the company’s continuing strategy to dominate gaming and the larger entertainment industry, and it communicated the full depth of that strategy at its investor day today ahead of the BlizzCon event in Anaheim, California.

Activision has occasionally diverged from that strategy over 35 years, but it has always come back to it. When current CEO Bobby Kotick took over an ailing Activision in 1991, the company had become known as “lack of vision,” Kotick recalled in a video. They had so little money that they had to make every game a hit. They still had passion. One of their earliest efforts, Return to Zork (a visual retelling of the classic Zork text adventure), was a “wild success” and it gave the company the capital to start making new games. That started the company’s focus on a “franchise strategy.”