From Vivendi's Press Release:


It looks like this is actually just Vivendi Games merging with Activision and leeching off of the Blizzard brand, or at least that's what Blizzard's Activision FAQ seems to suggest:

Great. As if Blizzard East and Blizzard West wasn't confusing enough, now there's Activision Blizzard too?
Wonderful.

What the... that doesn't even make sense! Why do people even do these things???

This changes nothing. Nothing.

Activision-Blizzard is an entirely different devision, much as the since-departed Blizzard North was. AB will, clearly, not have any effect on existing projects, or future projects which are the other devisions' purview. All AB has control of is their own development, and no-one else's.

That being said, I think its a good move, as Activision has made good games in the past, and with a ruthless taskmaster like Blizzard driving their development to a spit-polish mirror shine of refinement, it is likely that their games will start looking good again, after so many years of quality decline.

One has to wonder, however, if Blizzard does not have some ulterior motive behind this unforeseen acquisition. Dustin Browder, for instance, who is the current lead SC2 designer, has worked with Activision before. In fact, I believe he made his debut on the gaming development scene by working on one of Activision's more popular earlier games, if you catch my meaning.

Except Starcraft 2 is going to be the world's first extreme spaceboarding sim.

Oh man, Raynor on a spaceboard. He probably has to race Kerrigan on some sort of crazy course around a supernova in order to win control of the entire universe. Sweet!

Yeah, I for one expect nothing at all to change except possibly at Activision, and then for the better.

I really don't get it when game companies merge though. Why not just send the headhunters in and buy up all the good people at a company and expand your own existing operations? If you are buying a company for its intellectual properties, it seems a very expensive way of doing it. You could always just buy the one or two properties that motivate such a decision. Or better yet, hire the billions of eager new computer programmers that just got out of college and make them code something very similar. All you need is a few experienced managers.

I think this will tank the value of the Blizzard name and Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. will sue Vivendi to get out of their kung fu money loss death grip of doom. Of course, I knew Blizzard was screwed when they charged money for the expansion on top of subscription fees.

Coming soon, from Dairy Queen!



It is my hope this changes nothing at Blizzard, but only time will tell.

They want to charge for parts and labor? Pick one, jerks!

One cannot have ulterior motives behind acquisitions that one does not initiate. Activision and Vevendi, Blizzard's parent company (which has been that way for a very long time) are the ones involved, not Blizzard itself (which is why Blizzard seems to have an attitude of "we don't care"; it doesn't affect them much at all).

If they use this model for Starcraft II, I will scream, and then proceed to rip the heads off random bypassers. And then I will visit Irvine, CA, and do the same thing. Only then will I fork over the money.

It will be fine Blizzard has been owned for awhile now and they haven't changed a bit. Still making all the best games, very slowly.

Wow, there are some "interesting" replies. The move is sound and logical. It appears that Vivendi/Activision/etc are smart enough not to screw with Blizzard, they aren't stupid. This does however mean that Blizzard a) gets much better advertising and potentially has deeper pockets to work on things that might not come to fruition soon, or even ever.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/12/05

I wonder what this means for the Jedi Knight series... assuming any more sequels are ever produced.

Blizzard is already rolling in huge piles of cash. I would not be surprised at all if it wasn't Blizzard's massive profits that provided the means to get Activision for Vivendi.

Perhaps Blizzard intends to revive Infocom.

Hmmm...Activision published Doom 3 and many Call of Duty games...perhaps they did this as an excuse to revive Ghost.

Call of Duty 5: Zerg Warfare?

Hehe, if it's done in the same style and feel of AWESOME, I would play Call of Duty 5: Anything.

Actually, you know what? Playing as a terran in some sort of civil war would be really cool in a Call of Duty game now that I think about it. The campaign can be split between playing as a regular marine and playing as a ghost, and then there could be the occasional missions thrown in where you are the gunner in a battleship or something supporting ground troops, or driving a siege tank or other vehicle. Starcraft has always been about large squads fighting over various bits of territory and the like. As long as the only flying you did was scripted and they kept it as squad-based and terran-only, it could really really work.

Okay, I think I need to put my two cents a bit. Though I graduated as an electronics engineer, I do have some knowledge of economics. What I could gather from the press release and Blizzards FAQ is this:
- Activision as a company and VU Games as a company are merging to form a new entity; this entity will be owned at least 52% by Vivendi Universal (Vivendi will launch an offer to the public to buy more Activision shares, the result of which will vary, and at the end of the day they'll probably end up owning more than 52%). This means that, in effect, VU Games has enough value (primarily thanks to the Blizzard division) that Vivendi effectively has gained control of Activision.
- Blizzard was "only" a division of VU Games (another division of VU Games being Sierra, for instance), which already had great autonomy (in how they did their games, the games they did, the time they took to make them, etc.) within the company, from even before the time of Vivendi. The company they are now a division of is only a slightly different company which is still, at the end of the day, controlled by Vivendi. Their autonomy is not going to change, now only there are more development studios as siblings of Blizzard.
- The resources Blizzard can now get acces to, or on the contrary, they could share with the other divisions of Activision Blizzard, are not very extended. Distribution and a bit of marketing, I think. Also, their MMO infrastructure (servers, technicians, customer service) could perhaps be useful in launching another MMO. They're not going to merge development teams or whatever.
- The only thing that worries me a bit is that Blizzard is losing a bit of control over the "Blizzard" brand. As you have obviously noticed, they are using it to partly name the new company, which means this new entity gets to use it to an extent. But the Blizzard folks once said (can't remember where) that they considered the Blizzard brand their most valuable asset, and tried to "checkin" value in, and avoiding "checkouts". Therefore, the fact they lose a bit of control over the brand, combined with the quote from our good friend Kotick, raises a bit of worry. But I'm confident the agreement that Blizzard Entertainment did to lend the new "Activision Blizzard" entity the Blizzard name still allows them near complete control of the brand, and Kotick won't be able to change anything about it.