Piper Jaffray followed JPMorgan in predicting a Salesforce takeover price upwards of $100 per share. Piper calls Salesforce a "very attractive and unique asset," but admits it has no proprietary information about a potential deal. Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) and the large Internet centric vendors are the only tech companies likely to afford Salesforce, Piper believes. It points out that while Oracle denied it made an offer, the $10B in debt raised earlier this week by the company is likely to keep it near the top of the potential acquirer list. Piper says Salesforce potentially being in play raises the potential for any pure cloud vendor to be taken over, including Workday (WDAY) and ServiceNow (NOW), as well as "host of smaller pure cloud vendors and fast-growing non-cloud companies" such as Splunk (SPLK). The firm keeps an Overweight rating on Salesforce with an $80 price target.

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Sales of video games in Bethesda's "Fallout" series have surged across Europe, with 2015's "Fallout 4" reclaiming the top spot, Gamesindustry.biz's Christopher Dring reports. Sales of "Fallout 4" jumped 7,500% week-on-week across Europe, due to some heavy discounting on games in the "Fallout" franchise across all platforms designed to tie-in with Amazon Prime's (AMZN) "Fallout" television series, Dring says, citing GSD data. 2018's "Fallout 76," 2010's "Fallout: New Vegas," and 2008's "Fallout 3" rounded out Europe's weekly top ten as well, Dring says. The Fly notes that Microsoft (MSFT) acquired Bethesda in 2021. Reference Link

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Microsoft's Activision is dropping team entry fees for its professional Call of Duty League, and will return prior collected fees, as the esports industry faces profit challenges, Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio reports. A lawsuit this year from a former owner identified the fees as $27.5M per franchise. Activision is also offering the teams two-year minimum revenue guarantees, according to the report. Reference Link

Citi analyst Tyler Radke raised the firm's price target on ServiceNow to $906 from $896 and keeps a Buy rating on the shares. The analyst maintains a positive view on ServiceNow, holding estimates just above the high end of guidance as the firm's partner checks suggest solid demand and further Pro Plus interest. Commentary continued a similarly positive tone to Q4, as partners saw larger deal sizes and stronger pipelines than this time last year, the analyst tells investors in a research note. Citi says that while the shares have outperformed peers and the current valuation creates a high bar, a "beat/raise" quarter heading into the analyst and second half of 2024 growth acceleration "provide a positive event path."

Oracle Corporation Japan "announced that it plans to invest more than $8B over the next 10 years to meet the growing demand for cloud computing and AI infrastructure in Japan. The investment will grow Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's footprint across Japan. In addition, to help customers and partners address the digital sovereignty requirements in Japan, Oracle will significantly expand its operations and support engineering teams with Japan-based personnel. Oracle plans to increase local customer support of its public cloud regions in Tokyo and Osaka and its local operations teams for Oracle Alloy and OCI Dedicated Region. This will enable governments and businesses across Japan to continue to move their mission-critical workloads to the Oracle Cloud and embrace sovereign AI solutions."

Microsoft's (MSFT) Rare said that its 2018 video game "Sea of Thieves," has achieved 40M players across Xbox, Windows 10 and Steam so far. The Fly notes that the game is set to release on PlayStation 5 (SONY) on April 30. Reference Link

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