Does Activ. Own Blizz? Serious Question & Concern

Community General Discussion
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Does Activision OWN Blizzard? Not trying to start a flame war or anything, just trying to understand the situation.

Because according to all public info, it was a MERGER. Not a buyout, which means they are their own separate entities.

What we SEE though, seems to be totally different. Activision on a regular basis is bossing Blizzard around and telling them how to run their own games. And demanding that Blizzard do (insert random thing) in their own games to make ACTIVISION more money.
That isn’t the kind of thing you do when someone is your partner, it’s what you do when someone is your employee.

If they do own them, then that’s fine I guess (but not really, it’s killing Blizzard) but supposedly they do not. They are just merged, which begs the question. Why do they have any say… let alone increasing amounts of say in every little microscopic detail of what blizzard does, and who they have employed there?

What concerns me is that, for a long time now one of the biggest sources of community unhappiness is lack of communication. And feeling like things were rushed into going live.
Who would be responsible for handling those things you ask? Community managers (CM’s) and Quality Assurance (QA).
And recently, despite Activision CEO Bobby’s speech saying that “this has been the most profitable year EVER for the company” they go and eviscerate 800 employees. That’s not a “downsizing” that’s gutting/ eviscerating groups. And many of those groups that got annihilated were CM’s and QA.

So, the two biggest problems the WoW community has been plagued by for the last… what, 5-10 years is suddenly going to get better now that all the ppl responsible for making that better were fired? You can’t fix a problem by removing anything that relieves it. If anything, the 20% new hires needed to be in those roles. To make sure that things coming out for purchase were GOOD. And that communication was going to improve.

As it stands, our only sources of information between us and developers (CM’s) are almost non existent now. And the people that made Blizzard games the Marquee they were, are also gone.
It seems like we had a complete 360 from the days of Quality over Quantity, to Quantity is king, who cares if it’s good.

And that’s a really sad place to be in.

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A merger does not mean they are their own separate entities. LOL

A merger means they are ONE company now.

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Activision-Blizzard(ATVI) owns both Activision and Blizzard.

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It is often just called a merger as a euphemism, see ExxonMobil. Basically, Activision Blizzard is a corporation, and Blizzard is a company underneath that. Blizzard used to be firewalled to preserve its creative atmosphere but no longer. People are actively being injected into Blizzard as you can see from all the personnel turnover. Usually whoever is listed first has more influence in the structure that was created, kind of like in show business.

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You’re assuming that Blizzard would have acted differently outside of Activision’s influence.

I’m not so sure that’s correct. The people who created WoW are long-gone.

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Ok, I misworded that apparently and you are correct. There was a merger, but it was supposedly a partnership. Not a buyout or hostile takeover. There’s no reason Blizzard would have bought themselves out from Vivendi just to sell themselves to activision. They wanted to retain their independence. And that seems to be completely gone now.

They merged yes, But activision didn’t buy blizzard. So activision is not suppose to be an umbrella company with blizzard as a minor subsidiary that they can tell what to do.
They have their own separate offices, their own separate CEO’s CFO’s and the list goes on. Blizzard had always operated independently on their own schedules and with their own hierarchy and way of doing things that activision USE to not have any control over. Now though it seems like Activision is the only one with control in the company and we are seeing devastating effects.

That’s a great analogy that makes a lot of sense, thank you @Rocraden. :slight_smile:

I don’t know @Zeropointt, I really think they would have. Based off of how they performed from the time they launched their first 8bit games in the past till how things went till the moment of the merger.
There were a lot of veterans around the company still, until the last couple of years anyway.
Then it was like a storm was coming and everyone started to leave. Brevik left years ago, Metzen left, Kearn left, Morheim stepped down and left. That’s a MAJOR shift in a companies culture. Brack is still around yes, but that’s about the last man standing from the original gang. That’s creating a vacuum of power that’s left up for grabs and it seems to be getting claimed by Activision. Who doesn’t care about their customers that keep them in business, instead of Blizzard who always did.

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The people that created WoW are not only long gone but long gone with millions in their pockets.

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It was lich king fusion. Only one spirit can control be CEO.

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The takeaway I can give you is that they formed a holding company to hold all their studios in subsidiaries. That way, Blizzard, Activision, and other companies under the original companies would still exist.

However, the man in charge of Activision prior to the parent companies formation, or the merger, was Bobby Kotick. He ascended to CEO of Activision-Blizzard.

A lot of people see that as “Activision” taking the top role. The people in charge of Activision took over the parent company. It’s hard to argue they wouldn’t treat the entire umbrella as they had been treating their prior company.

Since they’d already had a negative public appeal, the concern was always that “Activision philosophy” was going to taint things. With the former Activision CEO in charge of everything, it’s not hard to see why.

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There’s a parent company called Activision-Blizzard, which is what the stock that is publicly traded is for.

Under that umbrella company, there are different divisions, namely Activision, Blizzard, and King.

But if you want to know whether Activision is really running the show via the Activision-Blizzard umbrella, you need only look at how many Activision-Blizzard officers are from Activision, vs. from Blizzard, vs. from outside of either.

And if it already isn’t obvious from recent events, the answer is that there are more Activision people calling the shots from above than by anybody else.

From Bobby Kotick’s wiki page: Robert A. Kotick (born 1963)[1] is an American businessman who serves as CEO of Activision Blizzard.[2] He was the head of several technology companies early in his career. He purchased a stake in Activision in 1990,[3][4] and became CEO the next year.[1] Kotick engineered the Activision Blizzard merger, and he became CEO of the combined company in 2008.

/moo :cow:

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This is incorrect.

Activision had it’s own parent company prior to the merger. It was the parent company’s that merged - Activision Inc and Vivendi Games.

Activision Inc renamed itself Activision Blizzard after the merger to honor and pay homage to the Blizzard brand. But no Activsion didn’t “take over the parent company”. The company formerly known as Activision Inc become Activision Blizzard.

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That will help make sense of it.

But basically what Bluespacecow said, Activision Blizzard is the parent company, they have 5 pillars under them.

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It’s not incorrect. You’re misreading, I believe.

Activision’s parent company merged with Vivendi games, that much is true, yes. However, Bobby Kotick, then CEO of Activision, was approved as the new CEO of Activision Blizzard.

My point was that the head of Activision became the head of Activision Blizzard. That’s not factually incorrect, because the CEO of Activision (Bobby Kotick) immediately became the CEO of the resulting merger parent company Activision Blizzard.

Decisions made under Bobby Kotick’s lead were often controversial, and Activision was already seen as a negative force in some corners. My point was that Bobby Kotick moved from just Activision to the CEO of Activision Blizzard itself.

While the technical details of “take over” might be mired by technical jargon, the result is the same here. Bobby Kotick, widely regarded as a terrible force in the gaming industry, moved from his singular control over Activision, to umbrella control over Activision Blizzard.

Whether he “took over” or not isn’t relevant, he ascended to a position of power from one company to a parent company with many under him.

Which is to say:

When we say “Activision took over”, we mean the singular company Activision (even then known for dubious quality) had leadership that moved into power over all the companies under the parent company. We mean, quite literally, the people who made decisions at Activision became the controllers of Activision Blizzard.

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While that might be what you intended using Activision Blizzard and Activision interchangeably is not appropriate as Activision is still an existing company, they have their own leadership, someone named Rob Kostich.

What is interesting is that they had a change in leadership recently. The previous guy was labeled CEO of Activision much like Mike Morhaime was CEO. The new guy is just labeled President of Activision much like J. Allen Brack is now just President of Blizzard.

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Why didn’t they just name themselves Actiblizzion? It’s so catchy… :crazy_face:

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Perhaps I should have worded myself better, but what I meant was:

The spirit and philosophy of Activision the company was attributed to Bobby Kotick. This man went on to be named CEO of the parent company that oversees Blizzard AND Activision, among others, known as Activision Blizzard.

Thus, the spirit of Activision is in charge, even if the company known as Activision now has different leadership.

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Now that would be correct. Clearly Vivendi gave Blizzard significant amounts of freedom to do as it pleased and that is changed drastically. Old Blizzard was just about making great games, I think Mike Morhaime truly believed that and that was his goal. Current design philosophy is about making more profits and that probably does not mesh well with old Blizzard. Whether that hurts the company and what it produces remains to be seen as many issues that currently affect their games seem to be on Blizzard themselves and hard to necessarily attribute to Corporate structure. It may take a few years here to see these effects and directly tie them to the Activision Blizzard.

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I think people tend to deflect too much blame onto Activision for Blizzard’s mistakes, but, yeah, a “merger” isn’t 2 separate companies working together. They’re literally made under a new banner as 1 single company, and -someone- is in charge of that company. In this case, it’s Kotick. Activision may not technically own Blizzard, but Activision-Blizzard does.

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Indeed. Even after this amount of time, it’s still a mired question of just how much has been on Blizzard, and how much has been corporate.

I posit that at least some has been on corporate. Even with significant amounts of freedom, Blizzard likely still had some moments of having to listen. I suspect the same was true after the merger, with them being an independent subsidiary. They’d have more leeway than usual, but perhaps less than before.

I think, for right now, fears are rising up faster than they have before, because Activision-Blizzard has finally done something very public that affects Blizzard. It is, however, a business. Whether we like what it did, or not, it could prove beneficial in the long term.

I suspect that the end result might be a company we’re unfamiliar with in more ways than one, but it doesn’t mean the company will fail. Much like how a friend who moves on from you might become a successful doctor. Good for them, but it still stings.

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Think ogre magi 2 head same body

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