While major franchises like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty are now owned by Microsoft thanks to its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a former executive from EA has revealed that we could have seen the publisher owning these franchises instead.
Speaking on the Grit podcast, former EA chief creative officer Bing Gordon spoke about how EA had the chance to buy Activision Blizzard IPs, including Guitar Hero, and even Blizzard as a whole. According to Gordon, “EA saw all those first and passed on all of them.”
For the context of time frame, EA had a chance to buy Blizzard before its acquisition by Activision back in 2008 when it was merging with Vivendi Games. EA reportedly declined the offer at the time.
“This is why I have double-high respect for [Robert Kotick] saying, ‘no, no, this is going to be good to own.’ And then you kept the people around,” said Gordon talking to former Activision boss Kotick. “I’m pretty sure that some of those companies, the creative leaders, would not have stuck around [for a company other than Activision], so you did some kind of miracle of keeping them productive for long periods of time.”
Incidentally, in the same podcast, Kotick revealed that there were several talks about a merger between EA and Activision Blizzard. “They tried to buy us a bunch of times, we had merger conversations a bunch of times,” said Kotick.
“While you were doing Blizzard, that EA passed on, and you were doing King, EA did PopCap — just stupid things,” responded Gordon, talking about EA’s own attempts at entering the casual gaming market at the time.
Since Microsoft completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the company has seen quite a spike in growth of gaming revenue. 49 percent revenue growth was reported by Microsoft back in early 2024. More recently, Microsoft has expressed interest in bringing the “full portfolio” of games by Activision Blizzard on to Game Pass.
