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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.'"
Not too often the summary itself IS the dupe...
How is the WoW community going to take it?
... alot.
I think it really matters whether the game developers are going to be replaced by Activision or not, as a decrease in quality might spark some anger.
Especially since their number of players are
I can't wait to start buying their games and various swag -- all emblazoned with the new Blactavision logos!
World of Command and Conquer?
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Provides some details. From their front page:
I screamed.
As long as Starcraft 2 is still going to be released, this is fine with me.
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.
Many news-sites are actually reporting this as a merger between Vivendi and Activision (perhaps more of a semantic distinction, but it does serve to remind that Blizzard is owned by someone, and is not an independant self-owned development studio, in the strictly on-paper sense).
:P
This is a fascinating move for one very important reason: EA. This merger combines a hugely profitable juggernaut of game-making (Blizzard) with what is probably the largest publisher out there (Activision). Electronic Arts suddenly got not only competition, but may have just dropped into second place, all in one fell swoop.
This is a great move for Blizzard: there is no other development company that is such a proven success, having long passed the point of "one hit wonder" or "a lucky run," and they now have access to, in light of how bankable they are, absolutely vast wodges of capital for their future plans. This is an awesome move for Activision: a publisher (with some developer in there too) that has quietly grown over the last decade to become one of the largest now has pretty much the ultimate triple-A development juggernaut at its core. This last bit is a key point, as it reflects EA. EA is large publisher wrapped around a large and important development house. Vivendi and Activision have now stepped up to that level and type of operation, and can be expected to give EA a run for its money.
What particularly pleases me is how this could be seen as providing a "good guys" team to stand against EA's often-percieved "bad guys" team, which should be an interesting public dynamic to watch
You know, that might actually be quite fun. Did you ever play Loom? That was a point-and-click adventure game where all your actions were done by playing short phrases of music.
Update it to the present day, and you have your character roaming the wilderness blowing monsters away with your sw33t r1ffs. The more powerful the spell, the harder it is to play, so your character's skills are directly related to your skills. If you could solve the lag issue, you could even have the ability to team up with other players and jam together for extra power.
Hmm. Different character classes would map to different types of music quite well. Healer == psychedelic 60s. Tank == 80s power ballad. Fighter == rock. Necromancer == death metal...
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.
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.