Massively^™

It's a hectic summer over at Blizzard HQ. Inundating the masses with Wrath of the Lich King across the pond at the World Wide Invitational, announcing Diablo 3 on top of that, and battling it out in the courts against the kingpin responsible for World of Warcraft's bot brigade. Aside from all that, there's the whole pending merger with Activision and Vivendi approval process with Blizzard Entertainment right in the middle.

The latest legal development involves a preliminary injunction filed by some shareholders who weren't satisfied with the $27.50 per share offer. The injunction suit was filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery last February by the Wayne County Employee's Retirement System in an attempt to halt the merger. Activision has announced that a Delaware Court junked that preliminary injunction, a decision made by the very illuminated and WoW-knowledgeable Chief Judge William B. Chandler III. Activision will be holding a stockholder meeting next Tuesday on July 8, if approved the merger will complete on July 9th and a new titan, Activision Blizzard will join forces and the gaming world will never be the same again.

We wonder how many level 70 characters the Judge plays or maybe he's already level 75 in the WotlK beta?

We don't know if anybody has told you, but Blizzard is actually kind of a big deal. Not many companies can hold the attention of their target audience for an entire week with naught but a series of cryptic splash pages. They're such a big deal, in fact, that when it came time for Vivendi to choose a partner for their big merger, Blizzard's preference for Activision was instrumental in their ultimate decision. That is, if Blizzard COO Paul Sams is to be believed.

It was no secret that Blizzard was the real prize in the merger, having pulled in approximately $1.2 billion for Vivendi in 2007 alone. With the twin juggernauts of Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 looming on the horizon, and their "next-gen MMO" project still lurking in the shadows, it seems clear that Sams' comments are anything but idle boasting. According to Sams, the leverage they have in this arrangement is what is going to allow them to preserve their existing management structure that has proved so spectacularly successful. I think that's something we can all get behind.

Murloc fans rejoice (and we know there are plenty of you), as Activision-Blizzard brings wonderful news. New downloadable content for Guitar Hero III will be available tomorrow, the 26th of June. The track? "I am Murloc" by Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain, which is based around everyone's favorite amphibious freaks from World of Warcraft. Even better is the fact that this DLC will come at the pleasing price-point of zilch. Check out the embedded clip of the song -- even if you don't particularly like it, who can argue with a freebie? There's really nothing else to say but *mmgrlglegrgle!*

[Via WoW Insider]

An acquisition on this scale doesn't happen overnight, and since the original announcement there have been numerous noteworthy developments. Gamasutra delves into the acquisition providing an in-depth analysis which focuses on the overall impact thus far about key players and their new positions, what this means for Blizzard Entertainment, and of course more numbers. The piece also includes commentary with some respected authorities in their field including Massively's own Michael Zenke.

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick told Gamasutra that his company explored avenues by which it might enter the MMO industry, but decided that the only sure way to succeed was to join forces with Blizzard.

That reality was a driving force behind the merger. "We kept looking at it, and realizing that even if we put hundreds of millions of dollars of capital towards it, and had the very best intellectual property, we still would very likely be unsuccessful," he said. "So the merger was really our mechanism to get access to Blizzard's talent, Blizzard's capability, their infrastructure."

Kotick has already said in the past that taking on World of Warcraft directly would be next-to-impossible even with virtually unlimited coffers. But others, such as EA Mythic's Mark jacobs, believe there's room for more than one 800 pound gorilla in the market. Perhaps the problem isn't so much competition as it is the fact that the production values bar has been set so high that MMOs have become too risky. They cost more to produce than most other games, and their success rate is uninspiring.

After reviewing Activision-Blizzard's case for a few weeks, the European Commission announced its approval of the huge merger yesterday. The EU had final say approving the merger because Vivendi is a French company. Officials decided the deal wouldn't threaten the fairness of the market.

The commission made a statement, saying that Activision Blizzard "would continue to face several strong, effective competitors, such as Electronic Arts, and the game console manufacturers, such as Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft." There were some concerns that the company could have an unfair advantage in licensing music for games because Vivendi owns Universal Music Group, but they were set aside because "competing game publishers would continue to have access to a sufficiently large portfolio of music rights from alternative suppliers."

The lesson: Activision Blizzard is officially not a monopoly, thanks to EA. We could go into extreme detail weighing the pluses and negatives of the decision, but we've analyzed this merger plenty enough already. At some point, you just have to decide to sit back and see what happens.

Well, what else would you expect from the company that brought you murlocs? April Fool's day is in full effect in Blizzardlandia, and World of Warcraft isn't the only game to get the treatment, but it's a good place to start!

Molten Core: for consoles
Heavily trading on fond gamer memories of Atari's Adventure, Blizzard brings us the console version of its popular 40-player raid dungeon Molten Core. The game's site features screenshots alongside concept art, and a trailer, even, with an 8-bit, pixelated version of the company's logo. We won't spoil the show for you, but the best bullet point for the game has to be 'Has sound'. Check it out and wait for your chance to pre-order!

In a discussion with investors yesterday, Actvision CEO Bobby Kotick mentioned how the soon-to-be-formalized merger with Vivendi Universal would give the new company the ability to leverage their properties in ways that were never before possible. Specifically, he mentioned how Activision could conceivably tap into the technical and creative expertise of Blizzard in developing the Call of Duty franchise into an MMO. This follows on the heels of another recent comment he made in public recently about Activision's research into the MMO space, and their perception of the considerably monetary barriers to entry.

While nothing about Kotick's comments seemed to indicate that a Call of Duty MMO was actually in development, it's still an interesting prospect to think about. Call of Duty 4, which is currently the most actively played game on Xbox Live, actually contains a number of gameplay elements reminiscent of an online RPG. There are classes, various skills and challenges to grind, and a persistent experience gain. It really wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine Call of Duty in an MMO context, or at the very least, containing even more elements from the genre to grab players and keep them coming back. But the very prospect of a collaboration between Infinity Ward and Blizzard is almost simply too much for my geek brain to handle, so for my sanity I'm just going to have to assume this was all executive-speak, and such a game will never happen.

We all know that World of Warcraft is the big daddy on the MMO block. Hell, with the amount of money Blizzard is raking in, World of Warcraft is the big daddy on the gaming block. And what's more, it's still growing. According a report, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick stated in an investor meeting that his company had done extensive research on the MMO category, and came to the conclusion that even a game bolstered by an initial investment of $500 million to $1 billion would still probably have a hell of a time competing in the same space as the Blizzard juggernaut. This likely came as part of their research prior to the massive merger with Vivendi Universal late last year.

Kotick points to the relative failures of big companies like Microsoft in trying to develop a competitive product as proof in the pudding. Even companies with decades-long track records of extracting money from lose-lose situations don't stand to gain much from trying to directly compete in the same space. For his part, Kotick believes it's the ingenuity of the guys at Blizzard that is really the deciding factor. Since no amount of money is liable to recreate the success of Blizzard, they simply found the prospect of buying them out more amenable. If you're wondering why it seems like so many MMO development houses are scaling down their products to make them more niche oriented, this is why. Throwing money, even a billion dollars, into a competition with World of Warcraft is only likely to end in tears.

Another juicy bit of news floated our way from Cryptic Studios, following a week of non-stop juicy morsels. They've announced that they've hired Ed Roffman to take over the position of chief financial officer effective immediately. Roffman has a long history on the financial side of the industry, working with Activision for much of the 1980's and several smaller software companies since then. He should be a strong asset on the Cryptic executive team.

The hiring of a new CFO (a new position for the Los Gatos developer) is only further confirmation of Cryptic Studios' aspirations to become an independent development powerhouse. Champions Online will be the first title developed and published by Cryptic, so it's crucial that they have the appropriate financial oversight to really see this project all the way through. And with current speculation that they're also working on at least two other original titles as well, this need is only going to be amplified with time.

[Via Gamasutra]

Fret not, PC gaming fans. As if in reply to the cries of Peter Molyneux, a new elite task force of industry giants has banded together to save PC gaming, under the banner of the PC Gaming Alliance. The group, which officially announced its existence at a GDC08 press conference, is comprised of some of the biggest names in the business, a mix of game development, OEM, and hardware companies: Activision, Epic, Microsoft, Dell, Alienware, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Acer, and Gateway.

Randy Stude of Intel is the fearless leader of the PCGA, and spoke of their strategy in bringing PC gaming to the attention of consumers: "One of our main major objectives is to provide one voice on the PC gaming market. There's no one source that says 'hey this is where the PC market is going'. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are always calling their market share -- we're going to call our market through this group." As well as their "united front" in promoting the PC as a gaming platform, the mix of companies within the PCGA plan to work closely together to share important and useful statistics, and to find solutions to issues like phishing, cheating and piracy.

[Via Develop]

Can WoW be killed? This is the question on the tongues of my WoW playing friends since the announcement of FunCom's upcoming title Age of Conan has been pushed back another 8 weeks. Some think it's to polish it just that extra little bit, so that they can come out of the gates running, but honesty I think they just want to make sure they are putting out as high a quality game as possible. Really this idea of a WoW Killer, has been going around for a long time, and frankly I think the whole idea is a bit silly. Like my compatriot Kevin Stallard states on a recent edition of 'Ask Massively', there are games like Ultima Online that have been plugging strong for over a decade now, without any real notion of stopping soon.

Certainly over the years MMO's have risen and fallen from the top spot, it started off with UO holding the torch, then moved along to EQ and pretty much since it's launch WoW has held fast and continued to gain popularity. And with ActiBlizzard's recent announcement that the World of Warcraft has just broken the 10 Million subscriber mark, it's unlikely we're going to see them toppled any time soon. To take a moment and put those numbers into perspective, 10 million subscribers would be like if every man, woman and child in Belgium did nothing but play WoW all the time. I know I'd certainly take the next flight out to Bruges, and settle in next to the Muscles from Brussels playing my Shaman for the good of mother Belgium!

But really, I don't think that there is any risk of a WoW killer, not because I don't think that AoC and EA Mythic's Warhammer Online aren't going to be 'as good' or even be able to compete against WoW, but because frankly I don't think it matters. From what I've seen so far from both of these titles, neither one is trying to be a WoW clone, and I think that's the rub right there. Nothing is going to "beat" WoW, just like nothing beat UO or EQ, they simply lost subscribers to the new evolution of the genre. There are still a great deal of people who play the older titles, things like FFXI, UO, EQ, and so on, but most MMO gamers aren't tied to a single title. I bet you that of those 10 million WoW subscribers at least 30% play at least one other title, and most of them have probably taken part in at least one beta test for another game.

Now that the dust is settling from the Activision/Vivendi merger announced over the weekend, the numbers fans are starting to chime in on the epic moneymaking potential of this merger. Sure, we knew Blizzard was making a great deal of money from World of Warcraft -- anyone with half a clue who paid the recurring $15 a month bill for the last three years knew that. But to many it came as a shock that in regards to 2007, WoW is expected to produce $520 million of pure unadulterated profit -- yes, that's after paying the bills. We suspect that even Donald Trump must be drooling at those numbers right about now.

If you're curious about just how this merger changes the financial landscape, Matt Vella from Businessweek has done a fairly good job with an overview of the potential impact. His story covers some familiar ground, but also compares EA against the proposed Activision Blizzard corporate monster. The only thing we'd have to take issue with is the claim that Sony (SOE) and NCsoft are "scrambling to get a piece" of the MMO market. The last time we checked, SOE have had their hands in the MMO pie for almost as long as there's been an MMO market. There's also the point that NCsoft has highly successful titles in the Eastern MMO market with Lineage/Lineage II -- and where's the love for CoX, GW, TR, etc? Do they want a larger piece or the market? Sure. But with name recognition in the industry already, they're well ahead of many others just jumping into the game. Nonetheless, it's an interesting read if you are curious how the business end of all this gameplaying is expected to shape up.

[Thanks, Matt]

Yesterday's news of the merger between Blizzard Entertainment and Activision caught pretty much everyone by surprise. That doesn't mean that there's nothing more to talk about, of course. Analysts and journalists have been working double-time to clarify the situation, and just 24 hours later there's an avalanche of information to work through. We'll try to help.

Let's start with the big picture. The best breakdown of the key points of this merger I found was over at GameSetWatch. The biggest key, I think, is the huge impact of World of Warcraft on the financials of parent company Vivendi: There's a reason why Blizzard have been and are left well alone - the clout that comes with this mindblowing statistic: "Blizzard Entertainment [which has "over 9.3 million subscribers" to World Of Warcraft] has projected calendar 2007 revenues of $1.1 billion, operating margins of over 40% and approximately $520 million of operating profit."

Another point stressed there, and reiterated in Blizzard's FAQ on the merger, is that Blizzard is going to maintain its independence. You won't have to worry about any crazy changes to World of Warcraft as a result of this deal. Blizzard's president Mike Morhaime sat down with 1up to talk things through, and he even went so far as to say that the company is still fairly cold on console gaming. Don't expect a slip in quality from solely Blizzard-branded products.

In a HUGE news story that we were quite unprepared to have fall into our laps on a lazy Sunday morning, it's been announced that Activision and Vivendi Games have signed a major agreement to the tune of $18.8 billion, that will see the two mega-publishing houses rolled into a company to be known as Activision Blizzard, which will collectively have the biggest and most expansive portfolio of game titles of any company to date - even surpassing rival Electronic Arts in sheer size and scope.

According to the terms of the agreement, Vivendi Games will be merged into Activision as a wholly owned subsidiary, and Vivendi Games stock will be turned into Activision common stock. We're not financial analysts nor are we fluent in legalese, so its difficult for us to interpret the exact terms of the deal, but Vivendi will come out of the merger as a 68% owner of the newly formed company. There's no indication yet if the merger will have any bearing on Blizzard's current or future development plans, though it seems likely that there is going to be a change as the management at the highest levels of the company will have a different face to it.

For some quotes from the parties involved, and our reaction, follow us after the jump.