Well i hope that who ever buys them fucks them so hard so that won't be able to sit down for the rest of their like, the way they are treating their clients lately, is no way to treat a customer...
Activision Blizzard for sale?
By
Brendan Sinclair, Senior Editor
Vivendi executives reportedly considering offloading games business in reorganization; market value projected at $13.4 billion.
LOS ANGELES--The industry's largest third-party publisher might be for sale. According to a Bloomberg report, senior executives of Activision Blizzard parent Vivendi are meeting later this month to determine whether they want to sell the telecom giant's majority stake in the game developer.
Citing "people with knowledge of the matter," Bloomberg reports that the Vivendi executive meeting is scheduled for June 22, with the possibility of an Activision Blizzard sale being the main point of discussion. The telecom company has reportedly been meeting with investors to discuss a variety of possible reorganizations recently, including spinning off the cable television division Canal Plus.
In late 2007, Vivendi announced an $18.9 billion merger between its own games group--which included Blizzard and its World of Warcraft business--and Activision, which at the time was riding high on the success of Guitar Hero and Call of Duty.
By
Brendan Sinclair, Senior Editor
Brendan Sinclair has been a games journalist since 1999. His tastes are eclectic, though he has a definite affinity for games with arcade roots. He's Canadian, but has also been at home in Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, and San Francisco.
422 comments
Blizzard sure has declined in quality over the past decade. I used to be a fan but now I hate them as much as Bank of America, EA, and Activision.
@Agent-M What you liked was not Blizzard but Blizzard North who made Diablo 2 and then later got fired...
@Majkic666 except no one from Blizzard North has yet to make their own mark on the industry. I have seen this comment made a lot. If Blizzard North was what made blizzard good, then they would have already made a game of blizzard quality.
@Agent-M Well you gotta think about it, no matter what they did, they had to. They'd been at the peak for too long. World of Warcraft was an amazing game, so that threw out ideals for RPGs, and its not easy to come up with new ideas for it after several expansions. Diablo III was destined to be praised, but not be as good as the previous two (Lets face it, there's only so much to do with a dungeon crawler, they didn't need a third). And then there's starcraft, which also is a game that is rather hard to build off of. They screwed themselves.
Even if they sell I think it's still business as usual. I wouldn't imagine any positive changes to come from this at least.
@CamolinaPanthrs lol, u realize that EA is worth 5 billions which is about 3 times less than Activision Blizzard right?
@s4dn3s5 Wow, I never realized EA was worth so little. I thought they were similar in size with craptivision blizzard.
1 Like Good business sell at the hight of COD as its never going to be any better than this
1 Like I can only see the richs become richer, imagine how much profit this company would make and the poor are still poor..
1 Like I feel like Blizzard will always be worth more in production value than any selling price they could get.
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Apparently this is a business move that Vivendi is doing to sell Activision at it's highest price
Diablo cgi movie with the quality of the release trailers perhaps better than FF VII Advent Children, anyone?
hopefully the new owners wont copy/paste their products from previous years , and ffs stop makin wow expansions, muddies and cheapens the brand
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@buccomatic Wait wait you still play that game HAHAHAHA!!! yay for poky mon come back!!
This is the time for one of the film companies to make their move.....preferably james camerons film studio or whatever he has (not michael bay! he sucks ass!)....I could see a great CGI with real people movie version of World Of Warcraft.......
1 Like heh if i i was that rich... id buy it. First thing id make wow into a better dynamic mmo. thats their baby to be honest. Stop the gold/charecter trading by offering a legit service with it (perhaps only on certain realms). add real world auction house. to maximixe profits but put money from profits into making the game better and bigger. wow should be the main focus . the other two games are OK.. but.. wow really is the center of blizzard i think. lets face it. make it the mmo it coudl be. add dynamic events like in GW2 . a mentor system. maybe housing. update the graphics somehow. add some user made content. perhaps? like user made dungeons. to expand the end game content add more social features. (like an actual IM system) and more charecter customization features actually in my opinion the entire charecter customization should be retooled) maybe even bring in full voice acting. For the win!
1 Like my left brains: im gonna buy that its so cheap, XPright brains: hell thats expensive, i cant even think of it??!!
1 Like I did a paper on the merger of Activision & Blizzard at university and it made perfect sense to have two companies that did well at the time in the pc and console market to merge. To put it bluntly there maybe a lot of resentment regarding CoD and to a lesser extent WoW however I assure this view is in the minority.
This would be the perfect time for Blizzard to divest itself from the entire group and stop letting it's profits from it's WoW, Diablo and Starcraft franchises fund the entire company. I imagine Blizzard could make even more stunning games if it kept the majority of it's profits for itself. They could probably even make more games than one or two new entries into existing franchises every decade or so.
It might be a good move really. Activision and blizzard are 1 trick ponies really. Activision makes a ton of games that are all mostly average and below average so in the grand scheme of things they actually don't make good games. There's just COD and that can't last forever. I think they are probably at the height of the COD craze and the only way to go is down. If they are thinking the same thing then you know the saying sell high but im sure the amount of money they are raking in is too much to resist.
3 Like profit hungry evil company? some people are deluded. THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO MAKE PROFITS- IT'S CALLED BUSINESS. this is not 1985, the era of the passionate bedroom 'coder are long gone. wake up. buy or do not. it is your choice.
3 Like @DARREN636 Actually, Indie gaming is looking better and better to me all the time thanks to those profit hungry companies.
@DireBadger You're under the assumption that "Indie Games" don't do it for the money as well?
This company will not change no matter who owns them. I am not sure why some people think they will.
@ExplicitMike actually the company that makes call of duty has just made a contract with activision that will let them make whatever they want after BLOPS 2 comes out, and they said that will definitely be making something else
@EvilMonkie3 There is no single company that "makes" Call of Duty. Treyarch developed the Black Ops series. Infinity Ward developed the first two Call of Duty games before Treyarch came aboard for COD 3. Infinity Ward's the company that did the Modern Warfare triology. Since then Activision has also brought on Sledgehammer to help in the development of the COD franchise. Treyarch is wholly owned by Activision and so is Infinity Ward. Unless they're going to purchase their freedom like Bungie did, there is no way they can dictate what games they will develop and what games they won't develop.
6 Like @DARREN636 COD will still be the same. WOW will still be the same. They might improve graphics, but that's it. All their corporate decisions will still be there. Online DRM, $15 DLC for like 4 maps, Killing franchises that don't make their projected revenue. I could go on forever, but you get the point.
1 Like OK guys who ever wins a lottery please buy Blizzard and let it be the company that made Warcraft 3, Starcraft 1 and Diablo 2 again. They just need a good publisher again and not a profit hungry evil one.
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