Vivendi Games to buy out Activision and form Activision Blizzard

I got beat to the punch by a fellow Massively writer, (blogger, scribe, scab, word regurgitating fool, whatever you want to call me) and instead of tossing this post the trash it goes here, which isn’t that different!

Hot off the press wires, Vivendi announced Sunday that it plans to acquire a controlling stake in Activision. Vivendi is to pay $1.7 billion in cash and fold its games operations into Activision’s leaving Vivendi with a 68 percent share of the combined company. The totaled transaction is said to be valued at $18.9 billion. I wondered what Vivendi was going to do with all that WoW money… For those that didn’t know, Blizzard Entertainment is a division of Vivendi Games, and has projected $520 million in operating profits for calendar 2007, thanks mainly to WoW. Once the dust settles and the deal is closed the new company will be called Activision Blizzard, and it will be the biggest independent video game publisher in the world.

Activision’s is best known for developing console titles such as Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, and Guitar Hero. The two companies said combined revenue for the 2007 calendar year will total 3.8 billion taking the tile from Electronic Arts whose revenue will clock in at 3.1 billion. Vivendi also owns the Universal Music Group, which will end up being beneficial for Guitar Hero, although Rock Band owns Guitar Hero. According to the New York Times, both companies will continue to trade publicly on Nasdaq under Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Entertainment is the most successful game studio in Vivendi’s game operations.

Mike Morhaime, President and Chief Executive Officer of Blizzard had this to say,
“Blizzard’s industry-leading PC games business, with a track record of nine consecutive bestsellers and a global subscriber base of more than 9.3 million World of Warcraft players, is an exceptional fit for Activision’s highly profitable console games business. From our interactions with the Activision team, it is clear we have much in common in terms of our approaches to game development and publishing. Above all, we are looking forward to continue creating great games for Blizzard gamers around the world, and we believe this new partnership will help us to do that even better than before.”

You can read about all the other gory payola details, and which Charles is going to be in charge in full via yahoo biz.