Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming: Activision + VU Games = WTF (I mean, "Activision Blizzard")

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Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming (Subscribe)

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Activision + VU Games = WTF (I mean, "Activision Blizzard")

Seriously, I didn't see this coming.

There's going to be a live Webcast Monday at 8:30 a.m. (Eastern). I'm guessing the Sunday press release is to head off leaks and rumors.

Vivendi Universal Games (VU Games, the interactive adjunct of Vivendi Universal), owns Blizzard Entertainment (who owns the Warcraft MMO, and the Diablo and Starcraft universes) is merging with Activision, and they're calling themselves "Activision Blizzard".

As an aside, this is an interesting elevation of the Blizzard brand. I almost wish they'd pulled an Infogrames, and elevated defunct Sierra like Infogrames elevated the defunct Atari brand (which isn't Atari to me, but I'm a purist). But the Blizzard brand is actually alive, and has more market and consumer pull.

This is a "mega-merger" for this vertical (and most others, at ~$18 billyun), and makes for interesting times in the publishing / developing landscape.

And it opens all sorts of opportunities for "If they mated" style jokes (the folks at Joystiq and Kotaku have been awake longer than me, and beat me to the "Guitarcraft" and "elves on skateboards" jokes. Personally, I'd like to see "World of Bournecraft", but that didn't require a merger. "Brutal Legend Bee Game" requires a merger. "Marvel Ultimate King's Quest Alliance" requires a merger. I could go on.

Anyway, here's the press release.

More on this tomorrow.

Labels: announcements, rumors