Actard Official At Last

...and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

It is the end times! The mammoth Activision-Blizzard merger is finally go-go-go, some eight months after the announcement that two publishing titans would make the beast with 18.9 billion (estimated) bucks. It's all official as of tomorrow, apparently.

92% of Activision's shareholders have approved the embiggening, which rather begs the question of why, exactly, the remaning 8% think joining forces with the enormously profitable owners of World of Warcraft is a bad idea. Unless they're some manner of anti-corporate altruists, but you don't tend too get many of those owning shares in large software publishing firms.

Worth noting that a) with their 52% of shares in the newborn Blactivision, Blizzard owners Vivendi are puppet-masters to this new behemoth. And b) seems the deal makes the new Blizzavision the biggest fish in gaming's pond, so we can perhaps expect the freshly-dethroned EA (valued by third-party guesstimators at $14.1bn compared to Zzarctiv's cool $18.9) to redouble efforts to gobble up 2K/Rockstar. That's it. Yes. It's war.