Activision acquires assets of Major League Gaming for $46M; CEO Robert Kotick says he wants to build “the ESPN of video games”
Nick Wingfield / New York Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes out a fast collapse: Ars Technica reported that Major League Gaming had already been shuttered around the buyout, meaning Activision paid $46M for the assets of an independent esports league that could no longer operate on its own. Kotick's stated goal — an 'ESPN of video games' — frames the purchase as a media-infrastructure play, not a games one.
The arc runs long from here. Six years later Kotick was still pushing acquisitions at Activision Blizzard, suggesting buys of trade publications like Kotaku and PC Gamer, and the company he built toward that media ambition ultimately disappeared into Microsoft's completed takeover.
First-order effects
- Major League Gaming stops existing as an independent league: its assets, staff, and broadcast operation are now inside Activision, which controls both the competitions and the channel that airs them.
Second-order effects
- ESPN and traditional sports broadcasters face a publisher-owned competitor that can bundle game rights with its own league and distribution, pressuring them to pay up or get cut out of esports rights.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to publishers swallowing third-party esports organizations outright, ending with league infrastructure consolidated under platform owners — a path that ran from Activision's $46M asset grab to Microsoft owning the whole company.
The trend: Esports is shifting from independent leagues to publisher-owned media businesses, with the largest platform owners eventually absorbing the publishers themselves.