(Note: This is the fourth of four news items from my reporting on the Activision Blizzard merger, which closed today. For the bigger picture, check out my story in tomorrow's Daily Variety about the impact of the deal on the entertainment biz, and, going online soon, my story in weekly Variety about how a single game sparked the biggest deal in videogame history)

Merging with Vivendi Games was not Bobby Kotick's first thought. While talking about the deal today, the Activision (and now Activision Blizzard) CEO admitted that in his first conversations with Vivendi Games CEO Bruce Hack, Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard and Vivendi Games Chairman René Pénisson, his intention was to buy Blizzard Entertainment. He even lined up financing for the purpose.

"We talked about the opportunity to buy Blizzard and they were adamant that they loved the [videogame] business and were committed to it," Kotick recalled. "They didn't want to sell the business but would entertain other ideas. They were struggling on the console side and needed to diversify into other parts of the business and recognized how difficult that would be independently, which is how we ultimately settled on this structure."Wow
That's a big change from early 2004, when Vivendi tried to sell its videogame business and nobody was willing to buy it. But it just goes to show what the single most profitable product in videogame history, with profit margins of over 50% and generating over $500 million in operating income per year, can do for a company.

Bobby Kotick wanted to buy that game, "World of Warcraft." But as Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillaume succinctly told me when were discussing the deal during a recent interview, something quite different happened: "'One game, World of Warcraft,' bought Activision."

http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2008/07/activision-trie.html

That last paragraph was for the lulz

Interesting, I knew that Vivindi wanted to sell Blizzard a while back, wonder why Activision didn't try then. And with WoW raking in $500 million a year I don't blame Vivindi for suddenly warming up to the video game industry.

well i just hope only good things come from this

anyone think we'll see a console version of WoW??

lmfao... world of warcraft is takin over !

no, I don't. Everyone has a computer and any computer can run WoW, so there is no point.

Current generation consoles really could not handle WoW. It's not the graphics, it's the storage space: the game is 4 discs to start with, and I now have 3.5 years worth of patches built on top of that. My current WoW folder is 27 GB.

All Core 360 users, All Premium 360 Users, All 20 GB PS3 users, and soon all 40 GB PS3 users wouldn't have enough room even if it was the only thing on their HD.

I don't expect consoles will be ready for MMOs until next generation.

wow 500 mlls a yr just from WoW, thats a lot they dont have to worry about money at least for the next 5 yrs

Plus starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 are coming. Which will sell very well. The next 2/3 years are probably going to be Blizzards most profitable ever. Lucky them.

They need to rework the engine in WoW to use less bandwidth so that they don't have to have so much server load and bandwidth costs. They can look at some ex-employees at Arena Net who claim they can make a full fledged MMO without monthly fees, and all ready have Guild Wars 1 which is a pseudo MMO and no monthly fee. Then they will really be raking in profits along with the release of Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 especially if they incorporate that technology into those games so that they have low server loads as well since people will be playing it online for years to come. Diablo 2 required 28.8 mbps internet while Guild Wars can be played on dial up.