Saturday, December 13, 2008

Darwin Revelation

Charles Darwin created his theory of Natural Selection with the intent of explaining the variation between creatures of the same species. His theory analyzed how creatures with certain hereditary attributes will fare better than others in specific environments, and thus will be more likely to survive long enough to pass those attributes on to their young. While Darwin specified that his writings were on organic beings, there are applications outside of the field of biology for this theory.

“It follows that any being if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometime varying conditions of life will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From this strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.” (Appleman 95)

Natural selection can be used to explain how social and economic aspects of life work. In a capitalistic economy, people often say “it’s a dog-eat-dog world” in reference to how easy it can be for small companies to be absorbed by larger corporations. For example: in late 2007, the large game publishing corporation Activision merged with Vivendi Games, another game publisher with many smaller game design studios that it partnered with or owned. All of the assets owned by both companies were now the property of a larger corporation by the name of Activision Blizzard.

“The overwhelming popularity of ‘Warcraft’ is what led Activision to consider doing a deal with Vivendi as opposed to trying to crack the multi-player market on its own.
‘We didn't feel we could deliver an audience experience like they have done,’ Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said in an interview. ‘As we began to talk, we realized we had these incredible synergies and a common belief on how the market would evolve.’ ” (Gallagher)

Activision’s motivation for the merger with Vivendi was to gain a hold of Vivendi’s Blizzard Entertainment, one of the largest and most profitable game development companies in North America. This effort allowed them to get into the PC market with Blizzard developing Starcraft II, Diablo II, and already having World of Warcraft, the largest money maker on the PC today. Since Activision had difficulty breaking into the massively multiplayer market they used the merger to improve their company and become part of a larger, much more profitable company. True to Darwin’s words: “Natural selection almost inevitably causes much extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called a divergence of character”. (Appleman 97) The merger of the two game publishes killed the individual companies, but allowed a new company to form with better attributes and more resources at hand.

The game industry at the moment favors large game production companies. With Electronic Arts, Microsoft Games, and Nintendo all controlling large portions of the industry, a merger placed both Vivendi and Activision in a competitive position. Had they not merged, both companies would not have had the ability to compete effectively in the industry against the heavyweights, and would most likely have spiraled downwards until they ultimately were bought out by the very companies they are trying to compete against.

Works Cited

Appleman, Philip, ed. Darwin. 3rd ed. New York: W.W.Norton, 2001.

Gallagher, Dan. “Vivendi, Activision to create video game giant”. Market Watch. The Wall Street Journal. 2 DEC 2007. http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/activision-vivendi-games-merge-create/story.aspx?guid={BBDC07E4-9608-46CC-8A83-F6B6AFD451AE}

Sessler, Adam. “Gaming's New Power Couple” G4. 6 Dec. 2007. http://files.g4tv.com/videoDB/019/317/video19317/go_sesslerssoapbox_merge_pod.mp4

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