Blizzard and Activision Merge

Coming on the heels of EA's acquisition of Bioware, WoW's website announced today that Blizzard and Activision are combining to form a new company dubbed, surprisingly enough, Activision Blizzard . Not exactly the most catchy name ever.

I can see what Activision has to gain from this combo, but I'm less clear on how Blizzard benefits. Activision seems to publish as many flops as it does hits, while Blizzard follows a tried-and-true formula of releasing a handful of games that are as polished and fun to play as any in the entire industry. I'm not sure why Blizzard would want to tie its future to that of Activision's, but I'm sure they did the math and it must somehow work in their favor.

The site's blurb mentions that nothing is really changing within Blizzard itself, so I'm guessing the entire company's workforce is breathing a collective sigh of relief. I bet Activision's crew gets no such reassurances.