Rumour: Is Vivendi Selling Its Majority Share in Activision Blizzard?

[News Portal]

Ever wanted to own a majority share in a multinational conglomerate? Your chance may be coming! According to Bloomberg, there are rumours that Vivendi will be selling its 61% majority stake in Activision Blizzard, a share worth around $8.1 billion. So if you have that cash lying around, Vivendi will be looking for buyers, or will sell the shares on the open market if a buyer doesn't surface.

Source: VG247

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[sfreak]

I think this is the perfect opportunity for THQ to step in and buy their share.....

[Krankite]

Or Valve could by it then we could finally combine blizzard and valve time and see if they cancel each other out or at least our great grandkids can play Ghost and Half-life 3

[Nekosan]

Blizz don't seem like a great investment if you're looking for growth in a company, they're distinctly lacking in fresh IP. They also don't release a great deal of titles.

[Goric]

EA may even have a crack at them as well. Just think, they could take down CoD from the inside making it really boring and repetitive and move everyone over to BF3. Oh wait, Activision already did that for them.

[Marius]

Zynga could buy them.

[Clontarf[X]]

Zynga could buy them.

QFT.

[Spooler]

I thought it was no longer rumor and that it had been confirmed ?

Most likely potential buyers are EA, Zenimax however I personally would love to see microsoft pick them up and make call of duty xbox exclusive no back up for this thought I just think the outrage would be hilarious

[Lord_Apophis]

I thought it was no longer rumor and that it had been confirmed ?

Most likely potential buyers are EA, Zenimax however I personally would love to see microsoft pick them up and make call of duty xbox exclusive no back up for this thought I just think the outrage would be hilarious

I can imagine all the screaming from fanboys now... Bahahaha

But in seriousness... I would like to see Valve pick them up... As Valve have a great history of not neglecting the PC. (And price stuff fairly to boot.)

If EA buy them... The Universe will probably collapse on itself.

[coatsy22]

Wonder if Notch has enough dough to buy em yet?

[PalZer0]

Maybe Ubisoft will buy them out. Seems like a good fit considering their penchant for terribad DRM.

[mindsnare]

Blizz don't seem like a great investment if you're looking for growth in a company, they're distinctly lacking in fresh IP. They also don't release a great deal of titles.

Seriously? There may only be 3 but they're pretty much the 3 biggest IPs in PC gaming. 2 of them are perpetual money makers. On top of that there's rumours of a successor to WoW along with 2 more Starcraft 2 expansions, which, I'm almost willing to bet will at some point evolve into some kind of F2P item buying model.

[Nekosan]

Blizz don't seem like a great investment if you're looking for growth in a company, they're distinctly lacking in fresh IP. They also don't release a great deal of titles.

Seriously? There may only be 3 but they're pretty much the 3 biggest IPs in PC gaming. 2 of them are perpetual money makers. On top of that there's rumours of a successor to WoW along with 2 more Starcraft 2 expansions, which, I'm almost willing to bet will at some point evolve into some kind of F2P item buying model.

They release maybe 3 AAA titles per decade and WoW has declining profits, very few investors are going to be willing to put money into a MMO in the first place so they doesn't make it any more attractive. It's just not as safe an investment as pumping out CoD every 9 months, the new MMO will probably sell a lot of copies just because it's Blizzard but its success is not guaranteed, statistically speaking the odds are against WoW's success being recreated and it's only going to take ONE of their titles flopping to mess things up.

Blizz aren't some untouchable cash cow, the gaming industry as a whole is just one big gamble.

[Marius]

The problem is while WoW is still profitable, its profits are declining. WoW largely got to its position by being innovative - it refined a lot of the existing elements in MMOs and made them more attractive to a wider market. Unfortunately, you can only do such innovations once - simply repeating them doesn't guarantee success. This puts Blizzard in the same position as any other entrant to the MMO market.

[Nekosan]

The problem is while WoW is still profitable, its profits are declining. WoW largely got to its position by being innovative - it refined a lot of the existing elements in MMOs and made them more attractive to a wider market. Unfortunately, you can only do such innovations once - simply repeating them doesn't guarantee success. This puts Blizzard in the same position as any other entrant to the MMO market.

Marius why are you awake at 5am? I thought you had a real job

You're spot on though, I'm pretty damn interested to see what they pull out with this new MMO. I actually think they're in a WORSE position than any new MMO dev when it comes to long term success on the new game, simply because the expectations are so ridiculously high. Sure it's going to ship a LOT of copies on day 1 just because of product awareness but that doesn't mean anything when it comes to the long term, look at how SWTOR turned out.

Of course that's assuming it ever gets to release, god only knows what kind of stupid budget they've allocated for it and it might just turn out one day that they've screwed themselves.