{"id":168,"date":"2008-11-24T22:39:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T22:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vhirsch.wordpress.com\/2008\/11\/24\/vivendi-mobile-games-is-history\/"},"modified":"2008-11-24T22:39:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-24T22:39:00","slug":"vivendi-mobile-games-is-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/24\/vivendi-mobile-games-is-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Vivendi Mobile Games is History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It had been announced previously<\/a> and now it seems to be confirmed<\/a>: Vivendi Mobile Games, the mobile games publishing arm of what now is Activision Blizzard<\/a>, has closed its doors in Europe (after it apparently<\/a> already did so in the US two weeks ago).\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
Background information on any reasons is hard to come by. Inability to control costs is a rumour frequently heard. One might also think that the overriding business outlook of Activision<\/a>, which has been licensing out its titles pretty successfully to the likes of Hands-On Mobile<\/a>\u00a0(Call of Duty<\/a> 1, 2, 3, True Crime: NYC, True Crime LA, Guitar Hero III an IV) and Glu<\/a>\u00a0(Call of Duty 4 and 5) – and perhaps less successfully to the now defunct Infospace Mobile (see here<\/a> where they ended up) who did or planned to do Tony Hawks et al on the one hand, and the Blizzard<\/a> unit that has a game on its hands that is awesomely succes<\/div>\n
sful but hard to translate to mobile (namely World of Warcraft<\/a>) did not leave room for a unit that could successfully compete internally.\u00a0<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Given that Activision’s CEO had also announced (transcript of its respective earnings call here<\/a>) \u00a0it would divest\/retire a lot of its more casual Sierra unit (because they could not be sequelled<\/span> on an annual basis; see some analysis here<\/a>), the demise of VMG might therefore point more to a strategic decision on Activision’s side. \u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It had been announced previously and now it seems to be confirmed: Vivendi Mobile Games, the mobile games publishing arm of what now is Activision Blizzard, has closed its doors in Europe (after it apparently already did so in the US two weeks ago).\u00a0 Background information on any reasons is hard to come by. Inability […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[22,82,87,102,248,276,585,653,662,694,695,696,727],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-activision","tag-blizzard","tag-bobby-kotick","tag-call-of-duty","tag-glu","tag-hands-on-mobile","tag-sierra","tag-tony-hawks","tag-true-crime","tag-vivendi","tag-vivendi-mobile-games","tag-vmg","tag-world-of-warcraft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSwZv-2I","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}