Blizzard President Mike Morhaime has addressed the concern of fans surrounding the Activision Blizzard merger by answering some questions to Jeff Green from 1up.com. Basically none of future Blizzard games will have a Activision or Activision Blizzard logo either on packaging or loading screen. Blizzard remains as independent as it has been since it joined VUGames. Read the full interview.
1UP: Okay, so tell us in your words what happened here today.
Morhaime: So in a nutshell, Vivendi announced earlier today that they’re going to be taking a majority stake in Activision. They’ll be injecting the Vivendi Games assets into the company, including Blizzard, and forming a new company called Activision Blizzard. When you look at Activision and Vivendi Games you see very complementary businesses. Activision has a great track record in console gaming, and Blizzard is the number one PC publisher and online game publisher. We’re very excited about it. But the main thing you should know is that everybody involved is very respectful of the business that we’ve built at Blizzard—and we feel the same way about Activision. The Blizzard brand will continue as you’ve always known it, there will be no changes to that, and will still be under the same operating structure.
Morhaime issued a second interview today with IGN.
Mike Morhaime: When you say “managing their developers,” the Blizzard Entertainment structure remains unchanged. I will remain president and CEO of Blizzard Entertainment reporting to Bobby Kotick who is CEO of Activision Blizzard. As far as development and publishing, Blizzard Entertainment will continue to be a publisher of computer games and will continue to be developing and maintaining our intellectual properties as we always have.
Mike Morhaime interview with Gamespot.
GS: So will all Activision Games be branded with a new Activision Blizzard logo?
MM: I’m not sure about a logo—that’s something we’ll have to discuss. But I think this issue is very important from a consumer-facing standpoint, so I want to emphasize it: The Activision and Blizzard brands will remain. We’re not going to put Blizzard Entertainment logos on Guitar Hero boxes and we’re not going to put Activision logos on World of Warcraft boxes.
Paul Younger from IncGamers, parent of WorldofWar.net, interviewed Mike Morhaime adding extra details into the mix concerning Blizzard games. A Diablo 3 question was pitched in. Read More
New York Times streamlined the details behind the Activision Blizzard Merger.
