With the merger of the two giants Vivendi Games and Activision, Robert Kotick, the CEO of the new company takes time to answer questions about the reasons for the merger and the future benefit.

About Robert Kotick

Robert Kotick has been active with Activision at least back to 1992 and has been heading the company during its recent successes with franchises such as Guitar Hero and the spider man games. He has a long list of games where he has been credited. In 2002 he was named the 40 richest under the age of 40 by Fortune magazine. Kotick is also the lead director of the board of directors at Yahoo!

High-lights from the Interview

"This puts under one roof the people who create the best online games and the best console games," Kotick says. I spoke to him at length Monday afternoon. "I've been petrified for about two years now," he says. He built Activision, which was founded in 1979, into a $2 billion-a-year traditional video game maker.

But even though it has been succeeding with games for the three new consoles that emerged recently - Xbox 360, Playstation3, and the Nintendo Wii - something important was going on elsewhere. "We started analyzing the online experience and realized that World of Warcraft was like nothing we'd ever seen," Kotick says. "It's not even just a business. It's a social network with this incredible entertainment component to it."

"People in our industry have tried and tried to build successful online games, with Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons and all kinds of things, but most of them failed," he continues. "We realized that to do something ourselves that would be big enough to affect our margins would cost us hundreds of millions of dollars. But even if we tried, we'd probably get it wrong."

Now Kotick envisions leveraging Blizzard's online expertise to build, for example, a great online version of Guitar Hero.

The newly-formed company, Kotick says, "unlocks the value of Blizzard" and other parts of Vivendi Games. "Being part of the biggest video game company in the world instead of a big French media company feels more relevant to the employees."

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