Unless you’ve been hiding a rock all day, you have undoubtedly heard by now that Activision and Vivendi Media, Blizzard Entertainment’s parent company, have agreed to a merger worth nearly $19 billion.
The resulting entity, known as “Activision Blizzard” will be headed up by Activision’s current CEO, Boby Kotick, and Vivendi will be the largest stakeholder in the newly formed company. Once the deal is complete, the two combined will likely overtake EA as the largest gaming company in the world.
The obvious question arising from out of all of this, at least, from our end, specializing in MMO news, is why Blizzard, at the top of their game, seemingly untouchable in the MMO market, with profit margins larger than the budgets of some small countries, would want to dilute their brand by hitching their wagon to the makers of Tony Hawk Pro Skater?
We obviously don’t have a definite answer to that at the moment, but, of course, there are no shortage of theories.
For instance…
The success Blizzard enjoys in the PC market has largely eluded it on consoles. Its last major attempt, Starcraft: Ghost was “indefinitely postponed” under murky circumstances following half a decade in development.
Activision has a very strong presence on consoles (the company was originally started by disgruntled Atari 2600 programmers, after all) , as the publishers of, among other titles, Guitar Hero, and the aforementioned Tony Hawk series.
It is certainly possible that Vivendi has eyes on the console market, either by a revival of Ghost, a port of WoW (FFXI has demonstrated that a cross-platform MMO is feasible) , or, Blizzard’s upcoming Top Secret MMO.
Only time will tell.
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