Vivendi is a French Mass Media and Telecommunications company with assets including Canal+ Group (TV group), Universal Music Group and Telecoms in France and Brazil. So how does this affect you? Well, they also currently own the controlling stake in Activision|Blizzard, 61% of the company in fact, and they are currently trying to sell it for $8 billion due to current financial woes, unfortunately most of the world is also in a similar situation and its struggling a little. So still you’re going: ‘So what? They can do what they like as long as I get the games I want!’ Well here is a little low down on what they own and who the potential buyers are and how it could mess you about!

The big hitters under the A|B banner are Call of Duty, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and Skylanders. Cod and Warcraft are potentially two of the biggest games in history bringing in millions of pounds in income every year. Furthermore Starcraft and Diablo are two more games that have a massive following and new people joining them every day. Then you have to factor in the newest growing game that is Skylanders, which was part of the Spyro franchise and now possibly even bigger with the younger generation, this game includes toys as peripherals that can be used with whatever console you have, and is currently only at the beginning of its profitability curve. The toys are also a great seller in such shops as Toys’r’us, and has potential to grow into something comparable to Pokémon or similar.

Then factor in licenses it holds such as Tony Hawks, 007, Transformers and Spiderman and you have some serious retail power. Not to mention the upcoming game Destiny, from the original creators of Halo that is Bungie, that has been tipped as the potential new game changer in console gaming much like Halo was back in 2001. Again I you’re like so what, they have lots of games big whoop. Well take a look at the potential buyers and see.

Two potential buyers are Activision|Blizzard itself and TimeWarner, if either of these were to happen it would be hard to see anything really changing, Xbox might not get its 30 days buffer of DLC before PlayStation but that would not come as that much of an issue to the consumer on Xbox but a great thing for PlayStation members.

Microsoft, it has been stated by Vivendi, is a great potential buyer. It is probably the strongest power on the market, with Sony basically falling apart and PlayStation being the only profitable part and investors losing trust in Nintendo, but is it really worth it for them? Well recently Microsoft posted it’s first every quarterly loss, although producing both a new console, new pc operating system and mobile operating system all during a economic down turn is always going to bring about a loss. Will it last? Probably not, October brings in the Windows 8 the new OS and they should be as right as rain. So then you have to ask would the $8billion price tag be worth it? Well having all the above games as exclusives would be amazing for them, but would it mean more people buy Xbox’s or would they just buy competitors games? For example would EA decide that games like Battlefield would become a PlayStation exclusive? Well no probably not, most likely neither of them would make their games exclusive to one console due to the amount they make from sales on other consoles. Call of Duty, for example, makes 40% of its sales from PlayStation, and Skylanders basically prides itself on its inter-console compatibility. The peripheral can be plugged into any console and the toys hold the data so can be taken to friends even if you have an Xbox and he has a Wii. As far as Warcraft and Diablo is concerned they don’t bother with the console wars and so would be much of an issue as they are basically a PC exclusive. So with making all the games exclusive being a massive risk to take what else could they do? Well they could continue selling to competitors. This may be a hard pill to swallow as it basically would mean showing how much they need other consoles to survive, and so would mean risking undermining themselves. Currently Microsoft have said they are not pursuing the deal, but have not written it off indefinitely.

As Vivendi said Microsoft was a great potential buyer, the question is does Microsoft feel that A|B is worth $8billion? Well if they did then it would be a massive gamble that could destroy PlayStation or end up being a massive balls up that would take a fair few years to make up the $8billion investment.

By Joshua ‘BeastlyD’ Lawrence