It wasn’t Blizzard’s choice to make, it was made by Vivendi I believe.
Reduce overhead and costs at the corporate level. It also expands their assets so that instead of needing to contract out to third party, they could just go to another branch of the company and pull from them.
That was back in 2013.
They’ve since sold off most of their shares.
https://investor.activision.com/node/31071/html
https://investor.activision.com/node/31136/html
Estimates on total shares are between 769,345,142 to 2,400,000,000
Neither Bobby nor Brian Kelly have anywhere near 1,224,000,000 shares.
Mike left the old Blizzard is gone. Activision will dominate the company from now on.
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Vivendi was probably looking to retrench after its digital asset acquisition binge in the 1990s didn’t pan out as expected. The brightest star in that bunch was Blizzard with that little known game, World of Warcraft followed by the BC and WotLK xpacs. No doubt the thought “who knows how long this bonanza might last” was going through their minds. So got into a position where they could cash out.
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Mike’s still at Activision Blizzard , just in an advisory position. He’ still getting paid by them until the end of next year at least.
I will sell them mine if they give me $100 per share.
That’s cute… I’m sure he’s sooooo involved.
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I feel ya Resurrect. I ask you to hold to something that I find comfort in as a writer and an artist. “A company built upon Intellectual Property requires creativity to flourish”. I have heard a number of people saying a number of things about this sell off. I have heard that the company dumped all of the people that built the product in the beginning. I don’t know what is true because I don’t concern myself with indicators I am not invested in. That said, I would suggest that I have rarely seen a corporate giant who “trimmed the fat” (in the form of those who built their intellectual property) and was not later passed, like they were backing up, by some hungry startup. One of my favorites is Netflix overtaking Blockbuster, or perhaps the bricks vs clicks event of Amazon bypassing Walmart.
Blizzard has never been by themselves, they’ve always been owned by a parent company. First Davidson, then CUC International, then Vivendi, and finally Activision-Blizzard. It was only when they were called Chaos Studios that they were independent.
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