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Vivendi-Activision Merger

News | April 17, 2008 (4 weeks, 1 day ago) | by Rixier | via www.cbc.ca | Filed in Blizzard Entertainment

French media giant Vivendi SA won permission from the European Commission on Wednesday to merge its video game unit with Activision in a $9.85-billion US deal.

activision

The commission said the combined company "would not significantly impede effective competition."

"The combined firm would continue to face several strong, effective competitors, such as Electronic Arts, and the game console manufacturers, such as Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft," the commission said in a statement.

Under the terms of the complicated deal, Vivendi will have a 52-per-cent stake in the new company, Activision Blizzard. On that basis, Vivendi and Activision valued the combined company at $18.9 billion US.

For more information Visit: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/20.../tech-activision-blizzard.html

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skipgamer
3 weeks, 6 days ago

I just hope blizzard tells activision to stop being dicks and releasing games that are incomplete / rehashes of old games just to make money. (guitar hero 3 anyone? srsly...)

Otherwise its going to be business as usual for activision, and thats not a good thing considering money lost by activision is now money lost by vivendi.

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hamor
4 weeks ago

You do realize that this news is now months old... I don't recall the specific date, but I'm tempted to think it wasn't even in 2008.

That said, Megaman is correct in that that is the companies stance. Blizzard will operate exactly as before, without even a change to the name that goes on the box. The change could even be good, as now Blizzard reports to Activision, rather than to Vivendi, who's games division is made up entirely of Blizzard and is primarily a utilities-oriented company.

There are no known plans for any kind of merged Blizzard/Activision titles (other than Blizzard's April Fool's joke of the Bard class in WoW). Don't read into this too heavily.

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Kody
4 weeks ago

No, this news is not months old. It's the merger itself -- this is news about the merger being approved which occurred yesterday. :)

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Megamanx266
4 weeks ago

Note that Blizzard is staying as it is.. If I remember previous posts correctly they're making an entirely new company called Activision Blizzard (as stated above) and Blizzard Entertainment will be left untouched (I hope to dear god I'm right on that one)

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BlackHawk1776
4 weeks, 1 day ago

I would be more concerned about Microsoft buying Yahoo than a merger of Activision and Blizzard. Maybe Blizzard can re-release Mechwarrior and make it not crash so much.

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AmIStoned
4 weeks, 1 day ago

Blizzard is slowly taking over the world.

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JewDew4
4 weeks ago

Blizzard aint taking over sh*t - Activision is !
It's they who are merging with all the other companies - the smaller ones bow for the bigger ones .

Just like Google taking over the smaller ones too .

Long live the vision of becoming like Microsoft =)

/sigh @ software companies at the moment !

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Zoidie
4 weeks ago

Erm...you do realise that Vivendi will hold 52% of the shares in the new company. So it actually is Vivendi/Blizzard thats taking over Activision.

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