Blizzard and Activision Announce $18.8bn Merger

Ebon Praetor writes "The BBC reports that Blizzard and Activision have announced an $18.8bn merger. Activision's CEO, Bobby Kotick, will become the head of the joint company, while Vivendi, Blizzard's current parent company, will become the largest single investor in the new group. Even with the size of the merger, the combined company will still be smaller than the industry giant EA. 'As part of the merger plan, Blizzard will invest $2bn in the new company, while Activision is putting up $1bn. The merged business will be called Activision Blizzard ... Vivendi will be the biggest shareholder in the group.'"

Comments

Here's an FAQ from Blizzard

[Jon.Laslow]

http://blizzard.com/press/activision-faq.shtml

Provides some details. From their front page:

Blizzard to Join Forces With Activision
We're pleased to announce that along with the other companies that make up Vivendi Games, we are merging with Activision to form a new global entertainment organization called Activision Blizzard (pending shareholder and regulatory approval). Similar to our previous arrangement, Blizzard Entertainment will now operate as a division of this new organization.

There will be no changes to our games, our websites, our personnel, or our day-to-day operations as a result of the deal. However, this combining of resources will benefit all of the companies involved and will further strengthen Blizzard's ability to continue delivering high-quality content for our players around the world for many years to come.

Re:World Of Warcraft

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Actually, if you look at the Gamasutra summary, it's Blizzard (well, Vivendi) buying out Activision. Vivendi gets 52% of the stock of the merged company and 6 of 11 seats on the board.

Re:World Of Warcraft

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Erm, which I suppose I should link.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16457

Re:Starcraft II ramifications

[Cyberllama]

I can afford the karma hit so I'm gonna say it like it is:

Blizzard hasn't been a "release it only when it's done" company since Warcraft 3: TFT. I've Participated in the last 4 Blizzard betas, and there was a remarkable shift from Warcraft 3: RoC to Warcraft 3: TFT -- you almost couldn't even call TFT a beta test by comparison. It lasted maybe 2 months total? The game came out very incomplete -- missing an entire single player campaign from what had been promised -- but was slowly added in over the course of several balance patches (the game as also a joke of balance when it came out). Blizzard, to their credit, did do a good job with the final product -- it just took them a couple months worth of patches after release to get the job done.

I hate to be the one to break the bad news to you, but Blizzard has been a "patch it till it's done" company for a few years now, just like everyone else.

This actually works out well enough in the MMORPG setting since often they are able to patch in missing content and polish/fix other content before players even get to it -- since it takes players some time to burn though the lower-end content which tends to be the most polished/playtested.

I do give them credit for actually delaying TBC (thus causing it to miss it's initial November 30th release date which would have meant massive Christmas sales) and spending more time with it -- but they almost didn't have a choice there -- there was literally no content above level 67 at the time and 3 out of the 7 zones weren't even populated/open/quested/etc, not to mention none of the raid content was implemented yet.