During the weekend, Vivendi Games and Activision announced a merger to become Activision Blizzard.  While this is news, some have taken the misguided notion that this will change their favorite games, which isn’t the case.

Vivendi Games, the owner of Blizzard Entertainment, has valued its company at $8.1 billion USD.  Adding another $1.7 billion USD, it gave the entire package to Activision in exchange for 52% of the newly merged company called Activision Blizzard.

So what does this really mean for gamers?  Not much, each individual label is being kept intact.  The offices, personal, and games will be kept separate.  The only thing that is really going to change is the money behind it.  With the merger between the two companies, it will allow the new company to place extra money behind games that may need extra funding, or stagger titles throughout the year to help keep sales at a higher consistent rate.

As the CEO Mike Morhaime of Blizzard told 1up, "The Activision Blizzard brand will not appear anywhere as a consumer-facing brand. Basically it is a corporate brand for the overall company. If you want to buy stock in the company, the stock is called Activision Blizzard;".

All in all, it’s about money, mainly for the people who own these companies, or shares in them.  For the foreseeable future, nothing is going to happen.  The brand labels on games like World of Warcraft and Guitar Hero are not going to change, nor the people working on them. 

So calm down people, it’s only a business move to improve profits.  They aren’t going to suddenly shut down games or change them on a whim.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 4:17 am under Opinion.

Read more entries by Emilie Branstetter.
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