Every so often, the message gets mangled. This is one of those times — time for a Fact Check.
I didn’t say much (or anything) about the recent business restructuring that happened at Activision because…well, it’s boring. A few people moved around, a few people got new titles, and instead of a Guitar Hero division, there’s a Call of Duty division to go along with the Owned division (Singularity, Blur, True Crime) and the Licensed Division (How to Train Your Dragon, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, Transformers: War for Cybertron). I didn’t say anything because if you’re a gamer, it doesn’t affect any of the games in development, and therefore, you don’t care.
Or so I thought. I got a letter today asking about all this stuff and I didn’t know why. Now I do: a few news outlets are inaccurately reporting (and repeating the inaccurate reporting of others) that there are four publishing divisions — those three I just outlined plus Blizzard. Um, no. Blizzard is not the fourth division; Blizzard is Blizzard. In my never-ending quest for clarity, let me explain how it breaks down.
The company is officially called Activision Blizzard, and as the name suggests, it has two main publishing divisions, Activision Publishing and Blizzard Entertainment. The Activision part reorganized into three business units. Blizzard Entertainment has remained the same — the restructuring was only on the Activision side, and Blizzard continues to do its thing as it sees fit. This week, “its thing” includes turning me into a pink bunny rabbit while I search for Noblegarden eggs.
So, as engaging as I’m sure that was, now you know the naked truth: Blizzard is not a sub-division of Activision. Nor can I think of any reason it would be.
And that’s a Fact Check. I need a “The More You Know” kind of graphic for these.
