Xbox Veteran Remembers Trying To Buy Blizzard Long Before the Big Activision-Blizzard Deal
Former Xbox vice president Ed Fries says that he tried to buy Blizzard multiple times back during his tenure at Microsoft before he left in 2004.
In a podcast with XboxEra, Fries implied that the acquistion would have made sense given Microsoft’s history with the PC platform, saying, “I was a huge Blizzard fan. If you think about the roots of our PC gaming business, it was real-time strategy…Warcraft, of course, was their biggest product.”
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Sik and Nick were joined by former Xbox Team and Microsoft legend Ed Fries and it’s a chat you won’t want to miss!#Xbox #Gaming #Podcast https://t.co/hgO6qiP3MH
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Back in 1994, learning software company Davidson and Associates acquired Blizzard (which was named Chaos Studios back then). In 1996, Davidson and Associates was acquired by Cendant Software, which Fries recalls losing out on, saying, “I just got outbid by a time-share camping business?”
Cendant was then put on sale, along with Blizzard, in 1998, which was when Vivendi bought the PC gaming studio. “Blizzard gets put up for sale a second time. And I bid again, and this time I get outbid by a French water utility,” Fries explains. This French water utility company had made strategic inroads into gaming, and acquired shares in developers like Ubisoft, though Vivendi sold all of its Ubisoft stock in 2018 following a failed takeover.
Fries says that once Blizzard made World of Warcraft, the studio was impossible to buy. However, the string of events has come back around and Microsoft finally bought Activision-Blizzard for 68 billion in January 2022.
Other studios Microsoft almost bought include Westwood Studios, the company behind Command & Conquer. He was putting a deal together to acquire the company and then went off on his honeymoon. Once he returned, EA managed to step in and buy Westwood instead of Microsoft.
The studio closed down in 2003 after it had merged with EA Los Angeles. Fries says, “I still think Westwood would have been better with Microsoft, but that one didn’t happen.”
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