Why did vivendi merger with activision

All the big holiday releases are out, offices are a skeleton crew of people who don't have any PTO left to take, and it often seems like everyone's quietly agreed to just hibernate until CES. That was not the case 10 years ago, when Activision and Vivendi Games announced a merger to form the world's biggest game publisher, Activision Blizzard.

It was a rare marriage between two titans of the industry simultaneously enjoying historic success. Activision had just launched Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, setting a template that the series and the entire genre would follow to great success for years to come. The rhythm game phenomenon was just starting to go properly mainstream with the release of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, and previous flagship franchises Spider-Man and Tony Hawk were still relevant and contributing players in the catalog.

Vivendi's total return on its Activision Blizzard investment was about 3. On the Blizzard side of things, World of Warcraft was still in its ascendency an almost unheard of three years after launch, boasting 9.

The news from earlier in the year that Blizzard was developing Starcraft II just made the deal that much bigger. And then there was the rest of Vivendi Games, which had recently released, um For all the success the combined Activision Blizzard had after the merger, one might have expected Vivendi to benefit a bit more handsomely from the deal than it did. To be fair, selling Activision Blizzard was never the company's first option.

Activision Blizzard will be directed by a board of key execs from the two companies; current Vivendi Games and Activision bosses Bruce Hack and Robert Kotick are to be appointed as two of eleven directors of the new super-publisher while Rene Penisson, currently a on the board of Vivendi and chairman of Vivendi Games, will serve as chairman of Activision Blizzard. Tags activision Activision Blizzard ben-parfitt Blizzard. Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn.

The Activision Blizzard buyout comes at a crucial time for the video game industry. Sony and Microsoft are about to launch a new console generation with the arrival of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this winter. Activision's Call of Duty Ghosts title is likely to be a key seller on the machines, as is next year's sci-fi adventure Destiny, a hugely ambitious new title from the studio behind the blockbusting Halo series. This article is more than 8 years old.