Blizzard-Activision could reap more money

The money for new creative efforts in computer games has all too often gone to those outside the industry. Having their revenue gobbled up by corporate owners who have interests outside computer games has likely stifled the industry and the art to some extent. Even Blizzard-Activision, one of the largest game makers, has been beholden to Vivendi, a company which deals primarily in music and mobile, but no more. Blizzard-Activision will likely soon become the second largest independent game maker in the world (after Nintendo) when they buy up another 50% of their shares from Vivendi, leaving the company with only 12% of the Game Maker.


Being independent will allow Blizzard-Activision to use all it's profits to develop additional games, or make it's existing games more expansive. It will also likely free them up to make decisions faster, because no matter how much freedom they were given it's likely they still had to ask Vivendi's permission to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course whether or not they take advantage of these things is still to be determined.

The problem is that there aren't a lot of examples of large purely independent production companies in any industry, Pixar was briefly an indie film maker, Image and Dark Horse represent independence in the Comic Book World and of course Nintendo does in the computer gaming world. This lack of case studies does make it difficult to predict exactly how this move will shake up the industry and the art form of computer games.

Even so I'm optimistic about this deal... I do have some concerns about the cost of creating new franchises like Titan (Blizzard's next planned MMO which is intended to be a new game franchise), as well as the decay of existing franchises like WOW. If Blizzard-Activision is going to gain long term success they likely do need to find cheaper ways to discover what will be a hit than the sometimes hundreds of millions spent to develop some MMO's which often don't score very well. Perhaps the most successful MMO, World of Warcraft, based on lower cost Warcraft games, has the answer in that providing more artists more freedom to explore games and story telling on lower budgets could give companies the opportunity to create more expansive games that have a greater chance of success.