The Maker Of 'Call Of Duty' Is Going Independent In $8.2 Billion Deal

Reuters/Nick AdamsActivision-Blizzard, the publisher of hit video games "Call of Duty," "World of Warcraft," and "StarCraft 2" is becoming independent in a $8.17 billion deal with Vivendi, the French media and telecommunications company that has held a 61% share of A-B since 2008.

According to Cliff Edwards and Marie Mawad at Bloomberg, Activision will take on debt in order to purchase $5.83 billion of its stock back from Vivendi. The other $2.34 billion will be purchased by a group of investors including Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, co-Chairman Brian Kelly, Chinese publisher Tencent Holdings, and others.

Vivendi has been looking at ways to extract some value from its shares of Activision for some time, including looking for potential buyers last year. Activision has returned value to its shareholders thanks to the deal as well — although the company is buying the shares at a discounted price of $13.60, the stock has risen almost 15% to $17.43 since the market opened today.

This deal also gives Activision-Blizzard some breathing room to work on its successor to "World of Warcraft," codenamed "Titan." As VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi noted back in May, the company moved 70% of the staff working on the game to different projects and rebooted the development on the project, delaying the game to 2016 at the earliest.

That's a big problem when "World of Warcraft," Activision-Blizzard's biggest cash cow, lost 1.3 million (of its 10 million) subscribers in the first quarter of 2013 alone.