IncGamers

Media powerhouse Vivendi is still looking to get rid of its majority €8 billion stake in Activision Blizzard, a “credible source” claims.

Said source has claims that a Vivendi sales of Activision Blizzard still “absolutely remains under consideration”, despite Vivendi’s finance director saying last week that a break up of the company was out of the question.

News first arose of Vivendi’s plans to sale Activision Blizzard this past July, when a price tag of €10 billion was touted.

Part of Vivendi’s problem is that it has €14bn in debts and its share price has halved in the last five years since 2007.  A sale of the its Activision Blizzard division could help repay the debt, but the €8 billion is proving to be an issue for potential buyers.

It’s being reported that Sony is not at all interested in purchasing the company, while communications with Microsoft are failing to move forward because of the asking price.

Of course, we’re waiting on official word from Vivendi, but that’s unlikely to arrive while negotiations are taking place.

Microsoft owning Call of Duty and World of Warcraft… that would be interesting.

 Source: CVG

€8bn is probably more money than Sony or MS could make in a gen, even if they outright won it. So it's a tough sale to those two.

Woah, that would be bloody hard to sell the company for such a high price...

world of warcraft is not what it was years ago or am i wrong? didn't it lose a lot of players and has to face now one more competitor with guild wars 2?

come on Nintendo - just buy 'em already!!

I love mention of Sony and Microsoft, as if they're the only ones able to buy them...

Not just Nintendo, but many other companies out there could buy them (Google, Apple, ubisoft, who knows). It's just weird the fanboyism in this industry's journalism.

In this case i (for once) don't think it's fanboyism. It could well be that those are the only buyers Vivendi is courting.

Really, now is not the time to buy Activision. Activision really reached their apex about two years ago (or more. Peak year is somewhere between 08 and '10). At this point, CoD is likely not going to see growth as explosive as before given the movement to the new generation reducing userbase and general saturation and series fatigue, and WoW's decline is only going to increase. Given that Activision has basically poisoned the well on everything else, they are not well-positioned to increase value. StarCraft and Diablo are important, but not so incredibly valuable as to replace the monetary power of WoW

Vivendi is probably screwed on the matter of their debt, and they're just going to have to hold on to A-B.

We gamers should all give one dollar (I mean, there's more than 8 billion of us, rightz?) and buy it!

Just to kill it afterwards! Just then can we live free from the cold oppression. A new life... for 1 dollar.

Those are good points, but it would be a strange coincidence that Vivendi is only courting Sony and Microsoft, since there are other very big players in the industry (like they themselves are). I would tend to think it's fanboyism only focusing on two prospective buyers, but I'll admit that you could possibly be right. However I have a hard time believing it.

Though it's true that the bid is extremely expensive, there are other potential buyers for certain.

It would be terrible if starcraft fell into the hands of a console developer