Activision Blizzard Splits From Vivendi in $8.2 Billion Deal

@paulunga: I think the record was more like 1.5mil concurrent, and that kinda doesnt mean that much, I mean one of wows expansions is (was?) the fastest selling pc game of all time and are regularly top sellers of the years they are released on top of monthly paid subscriptions as paid by eu and american customers. Gotta be honest as well that 30mil number sounds a bit like when world of tanks or league of legends quote players and its just the number of accounts that have ever been made, not that its not impressive, and not that warcraft doesnt massage numbers, just think it doesn't necessarily translate into money the same way as monthly subs do.

Uh people who care about the business behind gaming? That stuff is more intriguing than like 99% of Activision's games.

@shingro said:

True enough. Even when they do stuff that's not catered to the gamer market (like Skylanders), it's made clear early on that it's not for the same market as Call of Duty or their Blizzard offerings. They're not trying to TURN their mainstays into titles that reach other markets, but - GASP - making separate titles for separate markets!

It's something more gaming companies could stand to learn. Not everything has to be for everyone.

Well, last I heard, they were still 7 million strong, and that's quite the achievement for a nearly decade-old subscription-based MMO. People forget that game came out in 2004.

And now I feel old.

Where do you think you are? This isn't a Yahoo article about another scrawled message on a receipt or the Kardashians or whatever. This is a gaming website posting an article about the games industry. If you don't care, fine, but a lot of people who come to GiantBomb do care about and enjoy these articles.

Well, that 3 Billion on hand would keep them going for a good while.

Well, considering that they still bring in around $115,423,000 a month from their (dwindling) 7.7 million subscribers to WoW, that kinda cash isn't too hard to come by for Activision Blizzard.

If we multiply that monthly figure by twelve, we come to an income of approximately $1,385,076,000 per annum. And this is during the slow decline of WoW.

Yes, not all of that goes into the ActiBlizz bank account, but a lot of it does.

I'm still surprised that Kotick is around.

That summary and picture made me laugh. Bobby is so funny.

A company complains about losing profits from the sale of used games, but has enough money lying around to do something like this?

Because they gave us a giant copper statue that we were too cheap to clean once in a while?

They have shown you what colors to use on your beloved flag :D

That's a lot of Rories.

I wonder if that literally means 7 million active accounts, or 7 million accounts. Companies that keep track of accounts like that tend to fudge numbers by counting all accounts over active ones. Its possible they have 7 million accounts registered but not closed down due to people maybe wanting to come back, but somewhere in the range of 4-6(still a lot though) of actual 'active' players.

bam

@oldirtybearon: Oh man, can't stop thinking about a Weekend at Bernie's sitcom now.

That episode where they went to the taxidermist's was classic.

You built that and had no space for it, so you gave it to us. Thanks though.