Activision Blizzard, Inc.
(formerly Activision, Inc. and also known as Activision Blizzard King) is a Video Game publishing company that owns Activision, Blizzard Entertainment and King.com.
In December 2007, Activision announced that the company and its assets would merge with fellow games developer and publisher Vivendi Games, the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment. René Penisson, formerly a member of the Management Board of Vivendi and Chairman of Vivendi Universal Games, would serve as Chairman of Activision Blizzard. Bobby Kotick, once head of Activision, was announced to become President and CEO of Activision Blizzard.
On July 25, 2013, Activision Blizzard announced the purchase of 429 million shares from owner Vivendi for $5.83 billion, dropping the shareholder from a 63% stake to 11.8% by the end of the deal in September. Following the conclusion of the deal, Activision Blizzard became an independent company as a majority of the shares are owned by the public. Vivendi further reduced its stake to 5.8% in 2014 and completely exited Activision Blizzard in 2016. By this period, Activision Blizzard purchased mobile game developer King.com (best known for their popular Candy Crush series) which was announced the year prior.
Activision Blizzard was rocked by a large scandal in late July 2021, following the suicide of a female employee. The incident made way for a grand-scale reveal that the company had massive systematic issues with a toxic workplace culture and a slew of allegations about widespread sexual harassment and sexism against employees that had either been ignored or actively covered up by the internal HR department. Following the reveals, the state of California sued the company for failing to comply with safe work environment standards. In August of that same year, J. Allen Brack resigned as President of Blizzard Entertainment, while Jesse Meschuk, the company's head of global human resources, was fired following as a direct result of the surfacing of the allegations. Things have only gotten worse for the company from there; for more information, see Wikipedia's article on the lawsuit.
In January 2022, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. After a lengthy 20 months of getting legal approvals throughout the world, the deal was closed on October 13th, 2023 a few hours after Britain's Competition Markets Authority approved the deal. Following this, the company's board of directors was dissolved and multiple high level executives departed from the company including CEO Bobby Kotick who departed at the end of December 29th, 2023.
Activision Blizzard's subsidiaries and acquisitions
- Activision
- Blizzard Entertainment
- King.com
- Swordfish Studios (formerly)
- Neversoft (defunct)
- Vicarious Visions (absorbed into Blizzard)
