POSTED BY ANGUS GEDDES
It’s coming down to crunch time for Fairfax Media’s bidders with Friday the deadline for putting the wood on the table. There has been talk of a deadline extension, but I would be very surprised if either backed away, given the clear value in the company’s digital properties, and with media reform on the horizon.
Video games: Remastered
Activision Blizzard this week released a remastered version of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for the PlayStation 4 console. The game is one of the most critically acclaimed in its hugely successful Call of Duty franchise. The franchise is one of the biggest selling video games of all time and as of February 2016, the series had sold over 250 million copies, with revenue of more than $15 billion. Of course, these numbers will have since increased.
Call of Duty 4 was first released in 2007 on the PlayStation 3, going on to become the highest ranked game on that console that year according to Metacritic (with a score of 94 and universal acclaim from critics) and was the biggest selling video game of the year, with versions later available on Xbox and PC.
Modern Warfare: Remastered has updated graphics to take advantage of the huge advances in graphical processing power that have taken place since 2007. The remastered version was first bundled with special editions of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, the most recent release in the franchise. However, it became available as a standalone purchase on June 27 and Sony’s PlayStation will have a short period of exclusiveness.
If history is any guide the Xbox and PC versions will likely be available as a standalone purchase around August. Sony is held in the Global Opportunities and Asian Managed Account Portfolios and Activision Blizzard is held in the US Managed Account Portfolios.