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

Starcraft

[snl2587]

As long as Starcraft 2 is still going to be released, this is fine with me.

Re:Here's an FAQ from Blizzard

[TubeSteak]

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. I would have thought Activision was the one that needed to strengthen their ability to deliver high quality content.

They routinely rush studios to push out complete and utter crap under the Activision Value title. Even the decent games still come with serious flaws due to the rushed timetables.

Commentary

[hibiki_r]

It's not Blizzard that is merging: They've been part of Vivendi universal for years. Their parent company has many developers other developers outside of Blizzard. WoW is their cash cow though.

That said, it doesn't seem like their different developer studios have a lot of synergy though: The end result is a company that has very diverse offerings, and will be difficult to market as a single entity. It's not like either company needed the other for stability purposes though: Both WoW and Guitar Hero are the kind of franchises that allow a company to have a nice R&D budget and take risks with new franchises.

So I guess the merger will just mean they'll be able to push retailers around more easily, and make their revenue even more predictable.

Re:World Of Warcraft

[DurendalMac]

I doubt they're going to mess with Blizzard. It's going to be more like the Disney-Pixar buyout. Disney was at least smart enough not to mess with what Pixar was doing, because it was damned obvious that they were doing something right. If Activision has any shred of intelligence, they'll let Blizzard keep doing what they're doing with minimal interference, because Blizzard is making over $100m a month off of WoW.

Guitar Hero

[Kohath]

I think this is the real news:

Vivendi, owner of the Universal Music Group -- world's largest music publisher, buys a controlling stake in Activision, maker of Guitar Hero -- the world's most popular music-based game franchise.