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Activision Blizzard workers will stage a walkout after ‘abhorrent’ response to harassment suit
One of the world’s biggest video game companies is reeling after a state discrimination and sexual harassment suit kicked off a firestorm of controversy within the company. California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard last week, alleging that the company fostered a “breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women.”
Following a combative response to the lawsuit from corporate leadership, a group of employees at Blizzard will stage a walkout, which is planned for Wednesday at 10 a.m. PDT. Most employees at Blizzard continue to work remotely, but walkout participants will gather tomorrow at the gates to the company’s Irvine campus.
“Given last week’s statements from Activision Blizzard, Inc. and their legal counsel regarding the DFEH lawsuit, as well as the subsequent internal statement from Frances Townsend, and the many stories shared by current and former employees of Activision Blizzard since, we believe that our values as employees are not being accurately reflected in the words and actions of our leadership,” the organizers wrote.
In the new statement, they called for supporters to donate to organizations including Black Girls Code, the anti-sexual-violence organization RAINN and Girls Who Code.
Activision Blizzard publishes some of the biggest titles in gaming, including the Call of Duty franchise, World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Overwatch. Blizzard came under Activision’s wing through a 2008 merger and the subsidiary operates out of its own Irvine, California headquarters.
In the suit, the state agency describes a “frat house” atmosphere in which women are not only not afforded the same opportunities as their male counterparts, but are routinely and openly harassed, sometimes by their superiors.
The company pushed back last week in a fiery statement, blaming “unaccountable state bureaucrats that are driving many of the state’s best businesses out of California” for pursuing the lawsuit. Activision Blizzard Executive Vice President Frances Townsend, former Homeland Security adviser to George W. Bush, echoed that aggressive messaging in an internal memo, slamming the lawsuit as a “distorted and untrue picture of our company.”
In an open letter published Monday, the walkout’s organizers condemned Blizzard’s response to the lawsuit’s allegations. “We believe these statements have damaged our ongoing quest for equality inside and outside of our industry,” they wrote. “ … These statements make it clear that our leadership is not putting our values first.”
More than 2,600 employees signed the letter, which demands an end to mandatory arbitration clauses that “protect abusers and limit the ability of victims to seek restitution,” improved representation and opportunities for women and nonbinary employees, salary transparency and a full audit of diversity, equity and inclusion at the company.
On Twitter, streamers, gamers, game devs and former employees expressed support for Wednesday’s walkout under the hashtag #ActiBlizzWalkout, with some calling for a blackout on Activision Blizzard games as a show of solidarity. Others called for streamers to use the walkout time slot to raise awareness about rampant sexual harassment and discrimination in gaming culture at large.
One Blizzard employee shared a photo of the company’s iconic statue depicting an axe-wielding orc, a central feature of its Irvine headquarters. Three plaques displaying corporate values that surround the statue had been covered with paper: “Lead responsibly,” “play nice, play fair,” and “every voice matters.”
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Electronic Arts buys mobile game studio Playdemic for $1.4 billion
Video game giant Electronic Arts is continuing to make M&A moves as it looks to bulk up its presence in the mobile gaming world.
Fresh off the $2.4 billion acquisition of Glu Mobile this past April, their biggest purchase to date, Electronic Arts announced Wednesday that they are buying Warner Bros. Games’ mobile gaming studio Playdemic for $1.4 billion in an all-cash deal. The Manchester studio is best known for its release “Golf Clash” which the studio boasts has more than 80 million downloads globally.
The rather ominously named startup is being jettisoned to its new home ahead of the $43 billion WarnerMedia-Discovery deal where the rest of the Warner Bros. Games division will live post-merger.
Electronic Arts is the second-largest Western video games company with a market cap around $40 billion. Their success has largely come from desktop and console titles, including titles in their most popular franchises like Battlefield, Star Wars and Titanfall. Mobile dominance hasn’t come easy to the company, which has spent much of the past decade or so trying to keep pace with competitors like Activision Blizzard which struck gold with its 2016 King acquisition.
Electronic Arts has been on a studio-buying spree as of late — in 2021 they’ve announced three major acquisitions worth some $5 billion combined.
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Osso VR raises $14 million to bring virtual reality to surgical and medical device training
It seems that distance learning is even coming for the healthcare industry.
As remote work becomes the order of the day in the COVID-19 era, any tool that can bring training and education services to folks across industries is gaining a huge amount of investor interest — and that includes healthcare.
Virtual reality tools like those on offer from Osso VR have been raising investor dollars at a rapid clip, and now the Palo Alto, California-based virtual reality distribution platform joins their ranks with a $14 million round of financing.
The money came from a clutch of investors led by the investment arm of Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare giant whose network of managed care facilities and services spans the country. Previous backers and new investors like SignalFire, GSR, Scrum Ventures, Leslie Ventures and OCA Ventures also participated in the funding.
Osso has seen its adoption skyrocket during the pandemic as medical device manufacturers and healthcare networks turn to training tools that don’t require a technician to be physically present.
According to company founder Dr. Justin Barad, the market for medical device education services alone is currently around $3 billion to $5 billion and growing rapidly.
Staffed by a team that comes from Industrial Light and Magic, Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Apple, Osso VR makes generic educational content for training purposes and then produces company specific virtual reality educational videos for companies like Johnson & Johnson. Those productions can run the gamut from instructional videos on vascular surgery to robotic surgery training tips and tricks.
While Kaiser Permanente Ventures’ Amy Belt Raimundo said that the strategic investors’ decisions to commit capital aren’t based on what Kaiser Permanente uses, necessarily, the organization does take its cues from what employees want.
“We don’t tie our investment to a deployment or customer contract, but we look for the same signals within Kaiser Permanente,” said Belt Raimundo. But the organization did have employees interested in using the Osso technology. “We made the announcement that we are looking at [Osso VR] technology for use. And that’s where the investment and commercial decision was signaling off of each other, because the response showed that there was an unmet need there,” she said.
Osso VR currently has around 30 customers, 12 of which are in the medical device space. The company uses Oculus Quest headsets and is deployed in 20 teaching hospitals across 20 different countries. In a recent validation study, surgeons training with Osso VR showed a 230% improvement in overall surgical performance, the company said in a statement.
The goal, according to Barad, a lifelong coder with a game development credit from Activision/Blizzard, is to democratize healthcare. “This is about improving patient outcomes, democratizing access and improving education,” said Barad. “Now that the technology is growing and maturing and VR is growing as a platform, we can attack the broader problems in healthcare,” he said.
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Unity’s IPO numbers look pretty … unreal?
Unity, the company founded in a Copenhagen apartment in 2004, is poised for an initial public offering with numbers that look pretty strong.
Even as its main competitor, Epic Games, is in the throes of a very public fight with Apple over the fees the computer giant charges developers who sell applications (including games) on its platform (which has seen Epic’s games get the boot from the App Store), Unity has plowed ahead, narrowing its losses and maintaining its hold on over half of the game development market.
For the first six months of 2020, the company lost $54.2 million on $351.3 million in revenue. The company narrowed its losses compared to 2019, when the company lost $163.2 million on $541.8 million in revenue, and 2018 when the company lost $131.6 million on $380.8 million in revenue. As of June 30, 2020 the company had total assets of $1.29 billion and $453.2 million in cash.
Increasing revenue and narrowing losses are things that investors like to see in companies that they’re potentially going to invest in, as they point to a path to profitability. Another sign of the company’s success is the number of customers that contribute more than $100,000 in annual revenue. In the first six month of the year, Unity had 716 such customers, pointing to the health of its platform.
The company will trade on the NYSE under the single-letter ticker “U”. The NYSE only has a few single letters left to offer, although Pandora gave up the letter P when it was bought by Liberty Media back in 2018.
Unlike Epic Games, Unity has long worked with the major platforms and gaming companies to get their engine in front of as many developers and gamers as possible. In fact, the company estimates that 53% of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and over 50% of mobile, personal computer and console games were made with Unity.
Some of the top titles that the platform claims include Nintendo’s Mario Kart: Tour, Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp; Niantic’s Pokémon GO and Activision’s recent Call of Duty: Mobile are also Unity games.
The knock against Unity is that it’s not as powerful as Epic’s Unreal rendering engine, but that hasn’t stopped the company from making forays into industries beyond gaming — something that it will need to continue doing if it’s to be successful.
Unity already has a toehold in Hollywood, where it was used to recreate the jungle environment used in Disney’s “Lion King” remake (meanwhile, much of “The Mandalorian” was created using Epic’s Unreal engine).
Of course, Unity’s numbers also reveal that the size of its business is currently a bit smaller than its biggest rival. In 2019, Epic said it had earnings of $730 million on revenue of $4.2 billion, according to VentureBeat . And the North Carolina-based game developer is now worth $17.3 billion.
Still, the games market is likely big enough for both companies to thrive. “Historically there has been substantial industry convergence in the games developer tools business, but over the past decade the number of developers has increased so much, I believe the market can support two major players,” Piers Harding-Rolls, games analyst at Ampere Analysis, told the Financial Times.
Venture investors in the Unity platform have waited a long time for this moment, and they’re certainly confident in the company’s prospects.
The last investment round valued the company at $6 billion, with the secondary sale of $525 million worth of the company’s shares.
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Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 are getting remade from the ground up
2020 sucks. Want to let your brain slip back to 1999 for a while? This news might help: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 are coming back, complete with a full-blown graphic overhaul, online multiplayer — and, yes, the song “Superman” by Goldfinger.
Here’s the announcement trailer, which does a great job of showing just how much better things can look 20 years later:
THPS 1 and 2 were originally published by Activision and developed by Neversoft — a studio that, sadly, is no longer around. These remakes, meanwhile, are being built by Vicarious Visions — a team that Activision acquired back in 2005, and is probably best known for its 2017 remake of the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy.
A return to THPS’ roots is probably the right move for Activision right now; the last title they managed in the series, THPS5, was a bug-ridden mess that was largely slammed by critics and fans alike. As long as they get the mechanics and “feel” of this one right, nostalgia-factor alone should make it work.
The two titles will be sold as one “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2” package, and will feature every level and pro skater found in the originals — now in glorious 4K, with all of the 3D models and levels recreated from scratch. Also returning is most of the original soundtrack; licensing changes over the years prevent the remake’s soundtrack from being exhaustive, but most of the jams you remember should still be there.
THPS1+2 will be picking up a few tricks that didn’t appear in the series until THPS3 — perhaps most notable are reverts, which let you build absolutely massive combos and hit otherwise impossible scores.
Another big feature coming to the remakes that the originals lacked: online multiplayer. You’ll be able to play any level online with friends, or share levels you’ve pieced together in the “Create-A-Park” editor.
Tired of playing 1 and want to check out 2? Vicarious tells me you’ll be able to hop back and forth between the two titles pretty quickly, and that they’ve added a progression system that meshes the two together — so it’s less like playing two entirely separate games, and more like one game with two distinct halves.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is expected to hit PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on September 4th for $39, with pre-orderers getting access to the Warehouse level before the full game ships. Sadly, no mention of Switch support.
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Where FaZe Clan sees the future of gaming and entertainment
Lee Trink has spent nearly his entire career in the entertainment business. The former president of Capitol Records is now the head of FaZe Clan, an esports juggernaut that is one of the most recognizable names in the wildly popular phenomenon of competitive gaming.
Trink sees FaZe Clan as the voice of a new generation of consumers who are finding their voice and their identity through gaming — and it’s a voice that’s increasingly speaking volumes in the entertainment industry through a clutch of competitive esports teams, a clothing and lifestyle brand and a network of creators who feed the appetites of millions of young gamers.
As the company struggles with a lawsuit brought by one of its most famous players, Trink is looking to the future — and setting his sights on new markets and new games as he consolidates FaZe Clan’s role as the voice of a new generation.
“The teams and social media output that we create is all marketing,” he says. “It’s not that we have an overall marketing strategy that we then populate with all of these opportunities. We’re not maximizing all of our brands.”
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How Roblox avoided the gaming graveyard and grew into a $2.5B company
There are successful companies that grow fast and garner tons of press. Then there’s Roblox, a company which took at least a decade to hit its stride and has, relative to its current level of success, barely gotten any recognition or attention.
Why has Roblox’s story gone mostly untold? One reason is that it emerged from a whole generation of gaming portals and platforms. Some, like King.com, got lucky or pivoted their business. Others by and large failed.
Once companies like Facebook, Apple and Google got to the gaming scene, it just looked like a bad idea to try to build your own platform — and thus not worth talking about. Added to that, founder and CEO Dave Baszucki seems uninterested in press.
But overall, the problem has been that Roblox just seemed like an insignificant story for many, many years. The company had millions of users, sure. So did any number of popular games. In its early days, Roblox even looked like Minecraft, a game that was released long after Roblox went live, but that grew much, much faster.
Yet here we are today: Roblox now claims that half of all American children aged 9-12 are on its platform. It has jumped to 90 million monthly unique users and is poised to go international, potentially multiplying that number. And it’s unique. Essentially all other distribution services offering games through a portal have eventually fizzled, aside from some distant cousins like Steam.
This is the story of how Roblox not only survived, but built a thriving platform.
Seeds of an idea
(Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Before Roblox, there was Knowledge Revolution, a company that made teaching software. While designed to allow students to simulate physics experiments, perhaps predictably, they also treated it like a game.
“The fun seemed to be in building your own experiment,” says Baszucki. “When people were playing it and we went into schools and labs, they were all making car crashes and buildings fall down, making really funny stuff.” Provided with a sandbox, kids didn’t just make dry experiments about mass or velocity — they made games, or experiences they could show off to friends for a laugh.
Knowledge Revolution was founded in 1989, by Dave Baszucki and his brother Greg (who didn’t later co-found Roblox, but is now on its board). Nearly a decade later, it was acquired for $20 million by MSC Software, which made professional simulation tools. Dave continued there for another four years before leaving to become an angel investor.
Baszucki put money into Friendster, a company that pre-dated Facebook and MySpace in the social networking category. That investment seeded another piece of the idea for Roblox. Taken together, the legacy of Knowledge Revolution and Friendster were the two key components undergirding Roblox: a physics sandbox with strong creation tools, and a social graph.
Baszucki himself is a third piece of the puzzle. Part of an older set of entrepreneurs, which might be called the Steve Jobs generation, Baszucki’s archetype seems closer to Mr. Rogers than Jobs himself: unfailingly polite and enthusiastic, never claiming superior insight, and preferring to pass credit for his accomplishments on to others. In conversation, he shows interests both central and tangential to Roblox, like virtual environments, games, education, digital identity and the future of tech. Somewhere in this heady mix, the idea of Roblox came about.
The first release
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Tencent left out as China approves the release of 80 new video games
Chinese internet giant Tencent has been excluded from the first batch of video game license approvals issued by the state-run government since March.
China regulators approved Saturday the released of 80 online video games after a months-long freeze, Reuters first reported. None of the approved titles listed on the approval list were from Tencent Holdings, the world’s largest gaming company.
Licenses are usually granted on a first come, first serve basis in order of when studios file their applications, several game developers told TechCrunch. There are at least 7,000 titles in the waiting list, among which only 3,000 may receive the official licenses in 2019, China’s 21st Century Business Herald reported citing experts. Given the small chance of making it to the first batch, it’s unsurprising the country’s two largest game publishers Tencent and NetEase were absent.
The controlled and gradual unfreezing process is in line with a senior official’s announcement on December 21. While the Chinese gaming regulator is trying its best to greenlight titles as soon as possible, there is a huge number of applications in the pipeline, the official said. Without licenses, studios cannot legally monetize their titles in China. The hiatus in approval has slashed earnings in the world’s largest gaming market, which posted a 5.4 percent year-over-year growth in the first half of 2018, the slowest rate in the last ten years according to a report by Beijing-based research firm GPC and China’s official gaming association CNG.
Tencent is best known as the company behind WeChat, a popular messaging platform in China. But much of its revenue comes from gaming. Even with a recent decline in gaming revenue, the company has a thriving business that is majority owner of several companies including Activision, Grinding Gears Games, Riot and Supercell. In 2012, the company took a 40 percent stake in Epic Games, maker of Fortnite. Tencent also has alliances or publishing deals with other video gaming companies such as Square Enix, makers of Tomb Raider.
The ban on new video game titles in China has affected Tencent’s bottom line. The company reported revenue from gaming fell 4 percent in the third quarter due to the prolonged freeze on licenses. At the time, Tencent claimed it had 15 games with monetization approval in its pipeline. To combat pressure in its consumer-facing gaming business, the Chinese giant launched a major reorganization in October to focus more on enterprise-related initiatives such as cloud services and maps. Founder and CEO Pony Ma said at the time the strategic repositioning would prepare Tencent for the next 20 years of operation.
“In the second stage, we aspire to enable our partners in different industries to better connect with consumers via an expanding, open and connected ecosystem,” stated Ma.
China tightened restrictions in 2018 to combat games that are deemed illegal, immoral, low-quality or have a negative social impact such as those that make children addicted or near-sighted. This means studios, regardless of size, need to weigh new guidelines in their production and user interaction. Tencent placed its own restrictions on gaming in what appeared to be an attempt to assuage regulators. The company has expanded its age verification system, an effort aimed at curbing use of young players, and placed limits on daily play.
Update (December 30, 10:00 am, GMT+8): Adds context on China’s gaming industry and Tencent.
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What every startup founder should know about exits
The dream of a startup founder can often be summarized by the following well-intentioned, and mostly delusional, quote: “We’ll raise a few rounds and in a few years we’ll IPO on Nasdaq.”
But a more likely scenario looks something like this:
You invest a few years of hard work to build something of value. One day you receive an acquisition offer out of the blue. You’re elated. And you’re not prepared. You drop everything to focus on this opportunity. Exclusive due diligence starts. Your company is a mess (IP, contracts, burn). Days become weeks; weeks become months. You’ve neglected business and fundraising. You’re running out of money. M&A is now your one and only option. The buyer says they found a bunch of cockroaches in the walls and drops the price. Now what?
Sound unlikely?
This is still a favorable situation: You had an offer! Think about how much time you invested in your various funding rounds. The hundreds of names and Google spreadsheet or Streak-powered quasi-CRM process.
Have you spent even a fraction of that on understanding exit paths? If you’d rather not live the situation described above, read along.
The E-word: A strange taboo
Investors live by exits, but many founders keep dreaming of unicornization and avoid the “E-word” until it’s too late. Yet, in 2016, 97 percent of exits were M&As. And most happened before Series B.
Exits matter because that’s when you, your team and your investors get paid. Oddly enough, and to use a chess metaphor, we hear a lot about the “opening game” (lean startup) and the “mid-game” (growth), but very little about this “end game.”
As a result, founders miss opportunities or leave money on the table. This is a shame. Our fund has more than 700 companies in portfolio. We want the best possible exit for each of them. And fortune favors the prepared! Now, how to get 700 exits (and counting)?
To explore the topic, we organized a series of Master Classes tapping corporate buyers, bankers, investors, lawyers and startup CEOs with M&A or IPO experience in San Francisco. It was a group that included the founders of Guitar Hero — bought by Activision; JUMP Bikes — a SOSV portfolio company bought by Uber, Ubiquisys — bought by Cisco and Withings — bought by Nokia. Each one for hundreds of millions.
Their observations can be summarized below.
Maximize optionality
“Founders must be aware of what contributes to an exit. This means understanding partnerships and how they are formed in the business space the entrepreneur is working in,” said one Master Class participant.
As founders, you build your product, your company and… optionality. You need to understand the options open to your company, and take steps to enable them.
The most likely one is an acquisition, but there are others like IPO (including small cap), RTO, SBO, LBO, Equity Crowdfunding and even ICO.
“Exit is not a goal per se, but as a CEO it is something you should think about as early in your cycle as possible, while being business-focused,” said the London-based investor Frederic Rombaut, of Seraphim Capital.
Indeed, most participants said that exits should always be on the chief executive’s agenda, no matter how early in the process. “Exits should be on the CEO agenda. Not front and center, but on the agenda. M&A is a by-product of a great business and targeted BD. IPOs are always an option once you’ve built significant cashflow forecasting.”
It’s important to ask questions like: How many “strategic engagements” with potential buyers have you had this month? Is your message and value clear in their eyes? Have you considered an acquisition track in parallel to a fundraise?
It doesn’t stop there:
- Equity crowdfunding might help close some gaps at seed stage.
- Early IPOs on smaller exchanges can be an option to raise over $10 million — the robotics startup Balyo went public and raised €40 million on Euronext to get rid of a critical “right of first refusal” option held by one of its corporate investors.
- Reverse mergers can work too: the medical exoskeleton company EKSO Bionics went public this way.
One thing is sure: The time to exit is not when you’re running out of money.
Companies are bought, not sold
Unicorn or not, the most likely exit is an acquisition.
As George Patterson, managing director at HSBC in New York said, “Good tech companies are bought, not sold. The question is thus: how to get bought?”
Patterson says it’s important to understand how mergers and acquisitions actually work; how to prepare a startup for an exit; and how to develop a “feel” for the market you’re exiting through and into.
How M&A works
Hearing from corp dev veterans from Cisco, Logitech, Dassault and IBM, a few key ideas emerged:
Motivations vary
It could be from least to most expensive, or as a mix, as listed by Mark Suster, managing partner at Upfront Ventures:
- Talent hire ($1 million/dev as a rule of thumb — location matters)
- Product gap
- Revenue driver
- Strategic threat (avoid or delay disruption)
- Defensive move (can’t afford a competitor to own it)
How corporates find you
Corporates find deals via the development of partnerships, investment (CVC), their business units, corp dev research, media and investor connections.
Asked about the best approach, Todd Neville, manager of Corporate Business Development and Strategy at IBM (who gave the most detailed description of the corp dev process), said, “Do something cool to one of the IBM customers. If they rave about even a POC, we’re interested.”
In other words, business development is corporate development.
Get the house in order
Buyers typically want to know three things:
- Is your IP really yours?
- Is your team capable?
- Will your customers stick around?
For IP, they will check your contracts (staff and contractors), and run some automated code analysis for proprietary code and open source use. They will evaluate potential IP infringement. No point buying you if you end up costing more in lawsuits!
For your team skills: Sitting down with your engineers will tell them plenty enough without understanding the details of this or that algorithm. The last thing a corporate wants is to be accused of stealing!
Lawyers engaged early can help. The later the clean-up, the more costly and painful.
Develop a feel for your “market”
Develop relationships and create champions within corporates. It will help promote your deal when the time comes, and will let you keep your finger on the pulse of corporate strategy to time your moves.
Do you read the earning calls of Cisco or IBM (or others relevant to you)? This is where strategies are presented. Are your keywords coming up there or in their press releases?
Chris Gilbert, former CEO of Ubiquisys (sold to Cisco for more than $300 million) was very deliberate in planning his exit.
“Selling starts on day one and is a leadership-only function — work out who will be your buyer. Only the CEO can do this. Constantly articulate why a company should buy you,” Gilbert said. Bring clear messages into the acquiring company so it can be presented upwards: give them the presentation you would like them to show their boss! When the time is right, force decisions through competition. If you know they have to buy you, your starting position is strong.”
The dark art of price discovery
There are dozens of formulas (from DCF to comparables) to evaluate a deal — which also means none is “correct.” What matters is: How much would you sell for, and how much is the buyer ready to pay?
Gilbert, at Ubiquisys, described how close interactions with his banker helped drive the price up among the bidders assembled.
Just like buyers, we meet bankers and lawyers too rarely at startup events, but there is much to learn with them. They make deals happen, avoid value erosion and optimize price. They often also make introductions before you engage them, to build goodwill and earn your business.
And if you worry about fees, the right banker handsomely pays for itself by finding more bidders and playing “bad cop” for you, avoiding direct confrontation with your future employer. Do you want a slice of the watermelon or the whole grape?
Final twist: Exits are not exits
When asked about what happens after an M&A or IPO, buyers said they generally hoped the founders would stay with them for many years. Often using re-vesting, earn-outs or shares of the acquiring company to incentivize them. Neville, from IBM, mentioned a security company they acquired whose founder is now the head of one of the largest IBM divisions.
In the case of IPOs, supposedly the ultimate “exit,” any block of shares sold by founders would face extreme scrutiny and might cause a price drop.
So who’s exiting during those deals? Investors (and not always).
Eventually, if the average age of a startup at exit is 8-10 years, the active duty period of founders (if not replaced in the meantime) extends even more. Better love the problem you’re solving, and your customers!
Thanks to speakers, participants and supporters of this Master Class series:
London: Frederic Rombaut (Seraphim Capital), Joe Tabberer (FirstBank), Chris Gilbert (Ubiquisys), Jonathan Keeling (Crowdcube), Fred Destin, Tony Fish (AMF Ventures, James Clark (London Stock Exchange), Denise Law (SGCIB).
Paris: Frederic Rombaut (Seraphim Capital), Manuel Gruson (Dassault Systemes), Pierre-Henri Chappaz (Rothschild Global Advisory), Christine Lambert-Goue (All Invest), Olivier Younes (EXPEN), Eric Carreel (Withings), Fabien Bardinet (Balyo), Xavier Lazarus (Elaia Partners), Pierre-Eric Leibovici(Daphni). Jean de La Rochebrochard (Kima Ventures), Jeremy Sartre (SmartAngels), Gwen Regina Tan (Entrepreneur First).
San Francisco: Natasha Ligai (Logitech), Matt Cutler (Cisco),Will Hawthorne, (CODE Advisors), Ryan Rzepecki (JUMP Bikes), Charles Huang (Guitar Hero), Jeff Thomas (Nasdaq), Shahin Farshchi (Lux Capital), Ammar Hanafi (Moment Ventures), Adam J. Epstein (Third Creek Advisors), Nathan Harding (EKSO Bionics), Kate Whitcomb, Anthony Marino and Ethan Haigh (SOSV).
New York: Todd Neville (IBM), George Patterson (HSBC), Ryan Rzepecki (JUMP Bikes), Aaron Kellner (SeedInvest), Jeremy Levine (Bessemer Venture Partners), Taylor Greene (Collaborative Fund), Adam Rothenberg (BoxGroup), Eli Curi (Fenwick & West), Ian Engstrand and Salil Gandhi (Goodwin), Warren Spar(Sparring Partners Capital), Duncan Turner, Vivian Law and Sheng Ge (SOSV).
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Call of Duty Black Ops IIII adds battle royale mode while taking the game back to boots on the ground
In recent releases, Activision has taken its Call of Duty franchise into space (with its Infinite Warfare) and back in time (with the World War II release); now it’s looking to its past to bring it back to glory, while adding the massive multi-player Battle Royale mode.
The new Black Ops game is set within a narrative universe between Black Ops II and Black Ops III and stresses multi-player gaming like the battle royale, improved league play and collaborative features for gamers.
Critical to that is the franchise’s introduction of Battle Royale mode, bringing favorite characters, favorite weapons and the most iconic parts of players’ favorite maps along with the ever-popular zombies into a winner-take-all competitive landscape.
It’s a nod to the new ways gamers are playing and a pitch to rejuvenate Call of Duty — one of the world’s most popular game titles, with Black Ops as perhaps the most compelling title in the company’s arsenal. Previous releases have failed to capture the imagination in the same way as its early releases. Black Ops IIII is returning to the complete boots on the ground game play, and stressing the multi-player functionality that made the first games such a hit.
The game will launch in October and will be available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows.
Black Ops IIII doesn’t have a traditional campaign, but weaves narrative into each of the game’s modes. “This is a game that’s built to last for years to come,” said Treyarch chairman Mark Lamia.
The game developers stressed more nuanced game play, with improved sound and graphics capabilities like more refined muzzle flashes and better audio for improved orientation. Weapons mods are getting an upgrade; each weapon will get its own set of attachments. There are operator mods and better, more realistic recoil.
For players familiar with the game, Treyarch developers stressed changes to make the game more tactical, including a new healing mechanic and better situational awareness for more measured, strategic play.
“Tactical players can choose when to disengage and look for a better opportunity to survive,” said one of the Treyarch developers presenting onstage in a cavernous hangar at the Jet Center Los Angeles for the Call of Duty IIII community reveal. As part of the tactical emphasis, the company reintroduced characters like FireBreak to deal with aerial threats and two new specialists, a reconnaissance expert and a defensive player who can create tactical positions for teams.
Zombie mode
Black Ops IIII also adds new features and first-time experiences for fans of its Zombie mode. “As with the rest of the Black Ops IIII we’ve gone back to the drawing board on Zombies,” says Jason Blundell. “The zombies community has always been our most loyal…. So 10 years after it all began we’re about to begin a brand new chapter with the Zombie story right here.”
There are three zombie game-play scenarios. Two new scenarios include one set in a past, mythical Romanesque era while the other is set in the luxurious venue of the Titanic as the maiden voyage turns deadly and zombifying.
For both experiences there are going to be customizable tools and social experiences so that the new Zombie world can exist in an evergreen mode. On offer will be customizable zombie modes for ways fans can customize and trade their own zombies. There’s also a Black Ops stamp system to validate the work that’s been done.
Activision and Treyarch also introduced limited-time creative challenges for modding zombies, and promised new ways to play the game and updated seasonal themes based, in part, on player modifications. For Zombies, Black Ops IIII will include bot support to play with an artificial intelligence. Zombie Rush is a new mode designed to introduce players to the zombie universe and adding in-game tutorials. Difficulty settings are also customizable to encourage repeat game play.
PC focus
Black Ops IIII is the first title to be released on the multi-player Battle.net PC platform. The company is focused on PC as “its own unique platform, integrated with all the social features on Battle.net.” Players can talk across Black Ops IIII and Overwatch, and the company is emphasizing the customizable elements for PC gamers.
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