Latest gossip in the “Vivendi might be selling Activision” rumours that’ve been floating around comes courtesy Bloomberg, which reports today that Vivendi’s search is off to a slow start. Previous rumours had pegged Microsoft, Tencent, and Nexon as potential buyers.
Report: Vivendi Is Having A Hard Time Selling Activision
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8 responses to “Report: Vivendi Is Having A Hard Time Selling Activision”
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Boomzzilla
I get the feeling that buying Rare didn’t work out to well for MS,of hand I can’t think of one blockbuster they released not counting stuff like kinnect sports.
I think there trying to offload Acti/Blizz because WOW is slowly winding down and Blizzards next MMO will be very expensive to develop and as Star Wars:TOR showed there’s no such thing as a sure thing in MMO’s and Starcraft/Diablo 3 are out now and Blizzard apart from starcraft expansions will take years to make anything else new.
On the Activision side you only have Call of duty and Skylanders, cod has shown signs of slipping and Skylanders has a rather fickle childrens market.
And don’t forget no one knows their liability in the cod litigation, they may be limited on what cod games they can release or have to give royalties to West and Zampella.
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Riavan
What blizzard has for it’s mmo, which none others do, is it’s WoW engine, which no doubt the new MMO they are developing will be using, which is far ahead of anything the competitors have. No other AAA mmo’s offer a true seamless world, with pretty much no loading screens and the ability to fly the entire lengths of continents.
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Marcel
this is just pure speculation but there is an idea floating around that WoW 2.0 will simply have modern graphics, the quests and world will all be the same and you might even be able to transfer characters from WoW. In my opinion that is actually the best thing they could do. New players would want to get into the game as it looks like a new MMO and old players will swap because they won’t lose any content, plus as an added bonus the awesome world would be preserved. To be honest what else can they do? Warcraft makes the best MMO because everyone loves medieval fantasy like that, starcraft mmo would be bad and a diablo MMO might just work.
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Matt
The “WoW Engine” is terrible, Vanilla world of warcraft used the Warcraft 3 engine and since then blizzard has just been layering stuff on top of it. An example of dodgy mechanics is phasing in wow — it originated as a bug and rather than fixing the bug blizzard figured out what caused it and used it as a feature.
The advantages blizzard has over competitors with titan are:
1) fanboys defend everything blizzard do. Lack of content in cataclysm? the playbase must be greedy, number of active raiding guilds falling by 70% since 4.3 – its the communities fault 4.3 was perfect, etc.2) A large team that has experience working on mmo’s and the funds + reputation to allow them to spend as much money and time as they want.
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Ahtaps
Are you saying that the phasing mechanic is a dodgy hack that Blizzard should never have used? That taking something that was originally a bug which then clued them into a new way of doing something to improve the gameplay experience was a bad thing they never should have done?
A very long history of science and technology would like to have a talk with you. Many things we have today sprouted from people taking originally unintended behaviour and making it a useful technology.
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RocK_M
+1
3M’s billion dollar profits w/ the post it note would like to have a word with you Matt =P
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Jay
They have nearly finished there new MMO and have it in full production now to hurry up and get the game out next year.
Plus Blozzard are still making around $200 million a month just from the income of WoW and that is a huge amount for an MMO and is still the highest earning MMO of all time.
And why would you get rid of Blizzard when they are making a new MMO that is expecting to out do WoW. Obviosly they are having money problems now that Activision and Blizzards income cannot fix.
Theres alot more to the reasons behind all this then what we are seeing and hearing.
This might be another company collapsing because of buying companies they cant afford to kerp and can guarentee Activision are the ones loosing them money, cant think of one good game Activision have released in the past year or two and even CoD suks now and alot of people are sik of the formula, even with Black Ops 2’s game changing features, the game will still feel and play like any other CoD game.
They are selling Activision/Blizzard because Activision arent pumping out the money makings games except CoD which isnt enough for the money they loose from making failed games.
And I
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Michael
Vivendi are a conglomerate that own telcos, power companies and a million other products. They wouldn’t be struggling for money.
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