Two Giants Merge - Activision & Vivendi

You might have heard of Blizzard Entertainment and Sierra Entertainment with their great PC games, but did you know that their parent company, Vivendi Games are merging with Activision to form Activision Blizzard? Perhaps in two or three years time there might be a War Heroes or Guitar Craft?

Vivendi will be the majority share holder in the deal after purchasing $1.7 billion in Activision stock, and the whole deal is reported to be worth a whole $18.9 billion (cool). Vivendi will be buying up Activision’s shares at a 24% premium over the market value of $22.15, costing them $27.50 a share. All in all, Activision Blizzard will be raising $4 billion to buy up 146.5 million shares in order to get everything taken care of. Part of Vivendi’s reasoning for this is that they’re looking to diversify their reach. (Via Kotaku and Destructoid.)

Right now, with Sierra and Blizzard Entertainment dominating the PC gaming market, they should have got a wealth of money flowing in from the online and PC markets, but they want to expand into the console division. So, Vivendi is taking over Activision, who overshot EA as the top third party publisher, to dominate the world’s electronic gaming market. Will that ever happen? We’ll see soon.

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