Sunday evening news to us but Monday morning news to Europe, Vivendi disclosed that they would buy a controlling interest in Activision for a cool $10 Billion. This combination would create the world's largest online and console game publisher and rival Electronic Arts. This reads like a "done deal" with pricing for shares already hammered out. The new company will be known as "Activision Blizzard."

1up scoops the interview with Blizzard President and CEO Mike Morhaime.

... our games have never been branded as Vivendi. The Activision Blizzard brand will not appear anywhere as a consumer-facing brand. Basically it is a corporate brand for the overall company. ... Blizzard Entertainment will continue to be a publishing label.

The most important thing for our fans to understand is that we are preserving the Blizzard Entertainment brand. This was extremely important to me and the rest of the Blizzard team.

Don't freak out. It's a merger, not a buy-out. Your WoW experience isn't changing. We've already seen Mythic Entertainment merge with EA for EA-Mythic. Now it's Blizzard. Will we see a single gaming platform next or will we have games published both in Blu-Ray (PS3) and HD-DVD (XBox)? The Software houses have been pretty vocal about that recently.