Activision and Vivendi merge to form Activision Blizzard @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on December 02, 2007

News: When your powers combine I am Captain Planet! Except with companies instead of a teal superhero.

Activision and Vivendi Games have announced they've reached an agreement that will see the two large game publishers merge to form a mega-company known as Activision Blizzard. The new company is expected to have revenues of $3.8 billion in 2007, making it the largest third party game publisher by far.

And like other great mega-companies such as Umbrella and Weyland-Yutani, they'll begin playing god and creating unholy monstrosities any day now. I kid, I kid.

In all seriousness, after the merger is completed, Vivendi Games will own 68% of the new company, which will still be traded on the stock market under the ATVI symbol. President and CEO duties will fall to current Activision CEO Robert Kotick.

As far as gamers are concerned, this merger will put Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Tony Hawk, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro all under the same roof. In addition to these franchises, the new company will also own the publishing rights to future X-Men, Spider-Man, Shrek, James Bond, Transformers and Scarface games.

Fans of Blizzard and their World of Warcraft and Starcraft franchises should also not worry about this merger. Blizzard has announced that they do not plan on doing anything different after the merger. Development on the WoW expansion and Starcraft II will continue as normal and Bliizard's "when it's done" mantra of development will continue.

We'll have more on this surprising development soon.