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Daily Column

25 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! What a great start to December!

We had an ice-storm two nights ago, which meant I had no power yesterday. I then got my power back, but had no conventional Internet access. This Loading... brought to you in part by laptop and blackberry! My apologies for not getting the column out yesterday. I'm confident that Internet access should now be considered an essential service. You can tell it was a bad day yesterday as I took time to actually find some facts for this article. I feel great shame.

Activision and Vivendi (who own Blizzard) have merged. Shocker! Did anyone see this coming?

Activision was founded in 1979 as the first developer/publisher without its own game console. In 1985 Infocom, most notable for the Zork series of games, merged with Activision. This merger was odd in that Activision became the dominant party although they were the smaller of the two organizations. Activision is currently traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol ATVI.

The other half of this coupling is Vivendi Games and not Vivendi as many sites are reporting. Vivendi owns such gems as 20% of Universal Studios, A&M Records, Geffen Records, Polydor, Blizzard Entertainment, Sierra Online and Fox Interactive. Vivendi Games is a subsidiary of the much larger Vivendi entity.

Rather than take on the Vivendi name this new mutant company will be called Activision Blizzard. Yawn! I think we would have all preferred something like Blizzivision, Activizzard or my favourite, Actard. I eagerly await such new titles as World of Rapala Pro Fishing or World Series of PokerCraft.

In other news, GameSpot fired an editor. Some believe it was because of a negative review of advertiser Eidos' title Kane and Lynch. Others just feel the guy wasn't very good at his job. Read all about it. We have had a number of publishers pressure us for good editorial in return for advertising dollars. We have always declined. Some of those publishers advertised with us anyway. Others gave their money to sites that we compete with. Sites which coincidentally or not, gave the game positive editorial coverage.

It is very difficult for a site to turn down advertising dollars. Our decision to turn away money from gold sellers was excruciating. It comes up at every marketing meeting in some form or another. This network, the articles that you read and the information that you consume lives or dies by advertising dollars spent by MMOG companies. Without the support of the MMOG industry TenTonHammer.com would disappear. The only way that a site can not feel pressure from publishers (and let me be very clear that there are only a select few that have applied it) is if the members support the site to the point where advertising isn't necessary. If only 3% of our members purchased Premium Memberships we wouldn't need to run ads at all. It really doesn't take much.

On to more cheerful discussions, the Loading... t-shirt discussion has reached three-pages. I chuckled more than once. I admit it.

Comments, questions or naughty pictures? Hit the forum or hit my mailbox. --Boomjack

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today

Hot Content - Or, what I took a fancy to.

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Thanks as always for visiting TenTonHammer.com

- John "Boomjack" Hoskin and the Ten Ton Hammer Team

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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