Activision Blizzard Webcast

I'm online listening to the Activision Blizzard Webcast, and will be sort of live blogging, so refresh often.

This thing has been the works for at least a year.

Blizzard has an revenue of $1.1B, and operating income of $517M (and break even on all other activities).

There are more than 9.3M World of Warcraft, and claims to be the leading Western entertainment franchise in Asia.

Awe, he's saying nice things about Activision brass.

Activision slides aren't advancing.

The merger deal is appealing to respective company's shareholders. Go figure.

Activision is touting their IP pipeline -- Guitar Hero IV, Call of Duty 5, their entry into racing (by acquiring Bizarre), new Tony Hawk, James Bond, new Marvel titles, and new Dreamworks titles.

Activision is spelling out the market growth opportunity for the merger -- "margin expansion opportunities", and "operating models providing more leverage", etc.

Planning to be the "only publisher positioned to capitalize on all online and offline properties" -- there's a nod to leveraging the [expletive] out of mass market IP and sequels.

CFO Thomas Tippl is up to present the transaction structure and terms of the deal.

They're looking at 3-4 points margin expansion over the next two years for each of Sierra's and Blizzard's markets in the next two years.

They're claiming the mantle of "Most valuable Pure Play competitor" in the market -- easily double Electronic Arts.

There is an acknowledgment this merger brings together "the best development resources in the industry".

Now they're opening up to general questions.

(I got distracted after this, so check out Joystiq and Kotaku for summaries. I'm actually curious as to whether there will be any knock-on effects from this merger.)