Blizzard-Activision Merger Official

The Washington Post's Mike Musgrove is reporting that the Blizzard-Activision merger is official as of yesterday afternoon. "One analyst has predicted that the merged company would make $1.38 billion in profits during its first financial year, enough to make Activision Blizzard the world's largest game publisher. [...] But this merger should give the newly-formed company enough heft to compete with EA for such blockbuster projects, said Pachter. 'It's good to have a duopoly instead of a monopoly,' he said. 'This just makes the industry that much more interesting.'"

Comments

Profits

[zippthorne]

Doesn't Blizzard bring in more than a billion in profits a year, by itself? What's Activision bringing to the table?

Re:Where are the Games of Yore?

[MBGMorden]

The "games of yore" mindset is just another "back in my day" phenomenon. The kids who grew up gaming are getting older now. It's just a sad fact of reality that the when I think about all the awesome games I played as a kid, I'm looking at them through rose-colored glasses. Most, truth be told, had simplistic gameplay that I wouldn't enjoy now. That "magic" that the old games had was essentially that a lot of us were kids who were easily entertained. A little guy to move around on screen and some flashing lights and we were happy. I mean honestly, RC Pro Am or Contra aren't much more than twitchy little diversions.

These days, game companies are still coming out with tons of those types of boring, meaningless games. The kids now are eating them up, and we look at them with disdain saying "If only they had some REAL games like WE had when we were kids . . . uphill in the snow both ways yadda yadda". Don't get me wrong, I'm still an avid gamer, but I'm just much more selective now that I used to be. In generally I'll play through half a dozen games per year, but they're not the mindless little diversions that I once enjoyed. Now, it takes a very detailed game with an intricate story to wrap me in. Last full game I played through was Mass Effect. Currently I'm in the beginning stages of Assassin's Creed (which is decent so far).

So yeah, the games haven't gotten lower in quality as time has weathered on - it's just that our demands for them have gone up as we've gotten older.