From the Washington Post blog:

This afternoon (July 8,) game publisher Activision announced that its shareholders have voted to approve a merger with Vivendi Games.

The proposed merger between the two video game giants was announced in December, but required the blessing of Activision shareholders. The game publisher said that 92 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which is expected to close tomorrow.

One analyst has predicted that the merged company would make $1.38 billion in profits during its first financial year, enough to make Activision Blizzard the world’s largest game publisher

This could mean interesting things for the World of Warcraft, or maybe that the new company will have the resources to come up with similarly successful games.

But I don’t think I’ll be calling them Activision Blizzard very much…

More on Blizzard Activision:

Source: Activision’s ‘DJ Hero’ Was A Vivendi Game, Now A … – We now know that “DJ Hero” was in development under publisher Vivendi before they merged with Activision to become Activision Blizzard. The now-called “DJ Hero” was one of the few unannounced projects that the new mega-publisher decided …

More layoffs at Blizzard Activision – Vivendi, Blizzard’s owner, officially combined its interactive entertainment business with Activision, a publisher of mostly console games, in July and renamed the group Activision Blizzard. Layoffs have been reported at other locations …

Could Activision Enter The Console War? – Take a look at your game collection, and see how many of your games either have Activision, Blizzard, or Vivendi on them, and then think back to the Atari 2600, and how many quality games over the last 29 years have been released by …

Activision tried to buy Blizzard before merging with Vivendi Games – Merging with Vivendi Games was not Bobby Kotick’s first thought. While talking about the deal today, the Activision (and now Activision Blizzard) CEO admitted that in his first conversations with Vivendi Games CEO Bruce Hack, …

Obviously the World of Warcraft isn’t, and isn’t going to be, free to play, as interesting as that thought might be. But it seems that Bliz actually considered such a model (possibly ad supported,) then dumped it as being non-sustainable.

I happen to agree that a paid model is the way to go if you want to seriously develop a game. Whether of not we agree on the exact direction that Bliz takes with WoW I think we can all agree that they do a lot of support and development work so those few bucks that they pull in each month get put to use.

Here’s the clip, from Massively.com:

Blizzard’s own Rob Pardo recently dropped something of a bombshell about World of Warcraft at the Paris GDC event when he revealed in a keynote that the game was originally planned as a free-to-play experience. He also adds that, “We didn’t want to charge a subscription, but as we researched market conditions, we realized that wouldn’t support us.”

Here’s the rest of the article: WoW Originally Planned as Free to Play

Coming Real Soon Now, 2.4.3.

Lots of fixes and a few changes. Mounts will be availabel at level 30, for example.

Patch notes are on WoW Insider