MMORPG News - Activision & Blizzard Merger Announced

BBC News reports that Activtision and Blizzard have announced a merger between the two companies.

Blizzard is the biggest player in online gaming and Warcraft is the global market leader of what are known as massively multi-player online role-playing games, or MMORPGs.
It is currently owned by the French media group Vivendi.
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 and its chief executive will be Activision's current CEO Bobby Kotick. Vivendi will be the biggest shareholder in the group.

More information.

By the way you can already head over to the new site

http://www.activisionblizzard.com/

''The combination of Activision and Vivendi Games, Activision Blizzard, will create the world's largest, most profitable pure-play video game publisher with some of the most popular titles in the industry, including Guitar Hero®, Call of Duty®, Tony Hawk, World of Warcraft®, Starcraft® and Diablo®''


Just a thought on all this, nobody ever speaks of them anymore, in fact they arent even mentioned in this merger… But Sierra Entertainment is also owned by Vivendi and they've made/published some of the most well known game like the first Half-Life, King Quest, Gabriel Knight and one of my favorite RPG of all time, Betrayal at Krondor. Oh and I almost forgot, one of the oldest MMORPG, The Realm Online..



G.

Oh and how could I forget, Sierra also made/published the ''great'' *cough* expansion to diablo 1.. Diablo: Hellfire. =P

Nice, this is like Nostradamus territory here!

Why the hell would Blizzard need to "merge" with anyone? Can someone explain this? And, have the other company's CEO take over? WTF?

Originally Posted by chamr
Why the hell would Blizzard need to "merge" with anyone? Can someone explain this? And, have the other company's CEO take over? WTF?

They don't need to merge. In a global business economy, huge corporations can benefit from having everything they need access to "in house" so to speak.

OMG. This is huge. I guess it's possible they did it to face EA.

Checking calendar… no, not the first of April. WoW.

Does anyone here know more of Robert Kotick than what wikipedia offers?

Originally Posted by coyote
Checking calendar… no, not the first of April. WoW.

Hehe, yeah just what I thought as well, first.

One might only wonder about the reasons. I think they have quite different agendas and so far I can tell as mere customer also very different coprorate cultures. I dont see the gain in this atm, besides being bigger than before.

Most strange.

Nah, if your into corporatism they just became the biggest by teaming up, of course for us game fans this most likely will totally suck.
I was reading somewhere and wow is up to about 9 million and @ $15 per person, per month that's quite a bit of steady cash flow.

Oh goodie now I'll finally get Quest for Glory 6:The search for the phat loot. Oh happy day!!!