You try to navigate that deal, it's not just walk in and throw a briefcase of money on the desk and say it's done.
And it's not as complex as you think either. You open up negotiations, you bring in independent assessors, and you make an offer based on their assessment. You then take the deal to your own ceo who then takes it to the microsoft board with a plan of how this is going to make you money in the future.
The navigation of the deal isn't nearly as hard as the integration and management of the company, which is why most major M&A fail.
This is for so many reasons a poorly conceived plan
- Activision almost certainly is going to have a mass exodus at the closure of this deal
- Their IP outside of CoD are in serious decline
- They're significantly overpaying for Activision Blizzard
- There are currently no serious CoD competitors, but that won't be the case going forward
- The time and money it will take to integrate Activision into XGS, makes it almost not worth integrating, which begs the question of how they'll be managed
You look at Bungie and Sony is largely not going to integrate Bungie. They'll probably integrate them into a slack channel, provide resources, and allow them to share their resources with the rest of the PlayStation family, but the company is pretty much going to be its own thing and it seems that's already mostly the case for Sony's internal studios in the first place.
70 billion on Activision is going to be talked about in 5-10 years in terms of this being the next AOL TimeWarner