First of all, sorry for contributing to the "x is doooooomed!" nonsense that haunts VGChartz, oh well, deal with it.

In recent years, Activision  has supported itself with 3 franchises, which gained the company most of its revenue. It may come as a surprise to you that these are, Guitar Hero, Call of Duty and WoW (if it does, lurk moar)

1) Guitar Hero - how the mighty have fallen. Activision pretty much snapped the neck of this franchise by over milking it, and then rockband dragged it behind the shed and put it out of its misery. The Wii version of GH5 is limping to a million sales, and the other versions seem unlikely to reach this number. Chance of recovery? Very slim

2) Call of Duty - Lost many of their lead developers? Check. Pissed off the entire PC fanbase with the most recent game? Check. Possibly losing the rights to the franchise? Check. Whilst I hate to call doom on a franchise when the most recent iteration sold so incredibly well, I can only see the franchise heading downhill from here.

3) WoW - Ok, they're fine here - They made some ludicrous amount of money by selling a sparkly mount for $25 a pop, Cataclysm is coming out soon

The only other game of note is Starcraft 2, which is either going to be the worst selling but most pirated game ever, or it's going to sell as well as the first one, but be a $180 game and thus make a shitton of profit. Only time will tell

Basically, the Acti-Blizzard relationship is going to become Blizzard making all the money, and Activision spending it.

What do you guys think? Is the biggest 3rd party in the world domed? Can they pull an EA and actually convince us forum dwellers that they make good games and care about us and stuff?

One can only hope they collapse.

They still have control of the IP (I think?) and they still have Treyarch, which does a pretty good job with it.

Frankly, it's hard to imagine how Call of Duty could go anywhere but downhill, MW2 was so ludicrously successful. Activision can still get some good milk out of this cow before it has to be put to pasture.

there is no "relationship", the way they restructured the company, blizzard is simply a studio working under the activision umbrella

"West and Zampella's lawsuit was filed to force Activision to compensate West and Zampella for the unpaid royalties, and to secure contractual rights over the Modern Warfare branch of the Call of Duty franchise, among other things.^[28] If their lawsuit is successful, West and Zampella could retain the power to halt the development and release of any future games and downloadable content in the Modern Warfare setting" - wiki

Sorry, just the 'modern warfare' brand, not CoD as a whole

That is what CoD is to most people though. I can't believe I am saying this but, I hope they win the rights and we see an EA game labeled 'Modern Warfare'.

Treyarch is the "B Team" They won't see the success Infinity Ward had. And lets say they do make a massive hit with the next COD, next thing you know Activision is treatly Treyarch like shit and the Infinity Ward situation repeats.

Activision deserves to get screwed up (But not Blizzard)

I can only hope that blizzard can extricate themselves from Activision not that it would happen, I can see Activision continuing to downsize they have taken to many hits, maybe bobby will get fired we can only hope...

That would be a dream come true!

My only thought is that their one remaining leg (WoW) may not be the unbeatable giant that everyone believes it is. World of Warcraft has a lot going for it which is why it has been such an amazing success but it is also the only MMORPG that has been developed by a high quality development team; and would still be very enjoyable as a single player game. The success of World of Warcraft has certainly been noticed by every major publisher, and there has been a steady increase in focus on producing a high quality MMO experience from most of these publishers; and I can’t help but think it is only a matter of time before we see a game which is able to draw a significant portion of the WoW audience away.

Or to put it another way, at one point in time id software produced first person shooters which completely dominated the market in quality and sales. As time went on more and more developers began producing games that were increasingly competitive, many games intermittently held the title of best FPS on the market, and now id products are not that exceptional compared to their competition.