The Impact of Activision Blizzard
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As we've already stated, there's no argument that the merger of Activision and Vivendi has already had a vast impact across the industry, but once the company is established, what are the true, meaningful reverberations going to be? We asked game attorney and Gamasutra columnist Thomas H. Buscaglia, veteran online game journalist Michael Zenke (Massively, MMOG Nation) and financial analyst Michael Pachter from Wedbush Morgan for their unique opinions.
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There are few (if any) dissenting opinions with this opinion from most sources, though there are further possibilities that could impact Blizzard rather than simply messing with any of their carefully organized processes.
"Expect [Activision] to offer ideas about pricing and microtransactions that will enable Blizzard to be even more profitable," offered Pachter. "For example, I think Activision will ultimately figure out a way to extract some value from farmers who create things on WoW and sell to other subscribers, bypassing the middleman. Activision is sufficiently resourceful to figure out how to insert itself into the process as an exchange (a la eBay) and collect a transaction fee for sales of user generated content."
Similarly, "Advertising for Blizzard games is going to become more aggressive (as we've already seen happen with World of Warcraft)," said Zenke, though he agreed with general opinion that "Activision's reach isn't going to go much past the front door."
