"Vivendi SA said Sunday that it plans to acquire a controlling stake in Activision Inc. and combine the company with Vivendi Games in a deal that would create a rival to Electronic Arts Inc. as the world's largest video game publisher.The combination of Santa Monica-based Activision, whose titles include "Guitar Hero," "Call of Duty" and the "Tony Hawk" series, and Vivendi Games, which publishes "Crash Bandicoot" and owns the online role-playing franchise "World of Warcraft," would create the world's largest pure-play online and console game publisher, the companies said.

 

About time someone decides to heat up the competition against EA's empire.

 

Source: Yahoo Business

Activision just passed EA this year as the largest third party publisher, and blizzard has only released what, twelve games ever? I don't think this is as massive a deal as everyone makes it out to be.

Everytime Blizzard releases a game though it's always Game of the Year or gets a really big award. Hell i've even reserved Starcraft 2 and that doesn't come out till next year. Blizzard likes perfection and if it's not up to thier standards they won't release it.

Activision already owns 12 game studios, including Infinity Ward, this deal will just add five or six more. A big deal, but without Blizzard thrown in there it wouldn't be quite as massive. And the combined revenue of Blizzard and Acitivion will still not match EAs and as far as sheer number of studios is concerned EA is the winner with something like 24. EA will remain on top for a while.

With WoW alone blizzard is ranking in huge amounts of revenue.

 

It is a pretty large merger IMO.

Any time something happens that could give EA more competition, I am happy. Maybe it will force EA to actually finish games before releasing them for a change. No... probably not.

Any time something happens that could give EA more competition, I am happy. Maybe it will force EA to actually finish games before releasing them for a change. No... probably not.

Me too. Competition is healthy. I would market the "hey our games aren't beta tested on the public." route if I was competing with EA. I'm sure development teams get pressure from the board to release things early for revenue, but releasing things too early risks the brands integrity.