Vivendi Tries to Make EA Jealous
Posted on
Monday, December 03, 2007
by Gary A. Ballard
The video game news this morning is disappointing for video gamers. Yet another big video game merger has occurred, this time involving Vivendi and Activision. Not content with the cash cow that is World of Warcraft, Vivendi has merged its game division with Activision, publisher of such hits as Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk and Call of Duty. The new merged company will be called Activision Blizzard, with Vivendi holding a 52% stake in the venture. Of course, there is one thing to notice about this new company. Every successful game they have is some kind of sequel.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is an MMOG sequel to Blizzard's madly successful Warcraft series. All of the Activision titles listed in the linked article are franchise properties as well, with each having at least three different titles in the series. Blizzard's upcoming products include an expansion for WoW and a sequel to its classic RTS Starcraft series. The trend is unmistakable. Vivendi has built a company to rival Electronics Arts, following the same formula. That formula is to buy up developers with successful properties and leverage those properties into sequel after sequel after sequel.
While I believe WoW's success in the MMOG market has caused investment money to flow back into MMOG development, meaning more MMOG's will be made, I do worry that such money will be spent on shitty, slapdash attempts to clone WoW's gameplay. And the last thing the video game industry needed was another gigantic publisher with kneejerk sequelitis. Sequels are not by themselves bad things, and most accounts of Guitar Hero and Call of Duty sequels are positive. I myself even rated Call of Duty 3 for the Wii highly.
That said, giant corporate publishers with the means and desire to gobble up small developers like Electronic Arts have hurt the game industry. EA Sports acquisition of the exclusive NFL video game license has resulted in buggy rehashes of the Madden franchise, a series showing almost as much age as its namesake. We gamers do not need another monolith trying to out-shovel EA, we already have Ubisoft. Perhaps the three of them can get together and form the massive Blandotron, spitting out Splinter Cells, Maddens and Tony Hawks with the regularity of bowel movements.
Gird your loins. The sequel onslaught has begun.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is an MMOG sequel to Blizzard's madly successful Warcraft series. All of the Activision titles listed in the linked article are franchise properties as well, with each having at least three different titles in the series. Blizzard's upcoming products include an expansion for WoW and a sequel to its classic RTS Starcraft series. The trend is unmistakable. Vivendi has built a company to rival Electronics Arts, following the same formula. That formula is to buy up developers with successful properties and leverage those properties into sequel after sequel after sequel.
While I believe WoW's success in the MMOG market has caused investment money to flow back into MMOG development, meaning more MMOG's will be made, I do worry that such money will be spent on shitty, slapdash attempts to clone WoW's gameplay. And the last thing the video game industry needed was another gigantic publisher with kneejerk sequelitis. Sequels are not by themselves bad things, and most accounts of Guitar Hero and Call of Duty sequels are positive. I myself even rated Call of Duty 3 for the Wii highly.
That said, giant corporate publishers with the means and desire to gobble up small developers like Electronic Arts have hurt the game industry. EA Sports acquisition of the exclusive NFL video game license has resulted in buggy rehashes of the Madden franchise, a series showing almost as much age as its namesake. We gamers do not need another monolith trying to out-shovel EA, we already have Ubisoft. Perhaps the three of them can get together and form the massive Blandotron, spitting out Splinter Cells, Maddens and Tony Hawks with the regularity of bowel movements.
Gird your loins. The sequel onslaught has begun.
Labels: Corporate Corruption, Game Design, PS3, Video Games, Wii, X-Box
posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 10:19 AM
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