Bobby Kotick on the Activision-Vivendi Merger

Bobby Kotick spoke at the D: All Things Digital conference about several things, including the Activision-Vivendi merger. Now if I’m reading this right, he’s basically saying “we can’t compete with World of Warcraft, so instead we just bought it”.

“We did this gi-normous with Blizzard, the company that makes World of Warcraft. And having done this for 18 years, I’ve never seen anything quite like World of Warcraft, not just as a gaming experience, but as a social experience, as a business.

“…If we put hundreds of millions of dollars of capital towards [developing an MMO] and had the very best intellectual property, we would still likely be unsuccessful. So the merger is really our mechanism to get access to Blizzard’s talent, capability and infrastructure.”