Early this morning, the newly-coined Activision Blizzard held a conference call to discuss this weekend's shocking news that Activision and Vivendi Games have merged. 1UP listened in to see if there was any further news on the merger, but as might be expected for a shareholder call most of it was spent discussing how brilliant the deal is financially.
As with yesterday's announcement, there was a large amount of focus on how Activision Blizzard is now the world's largest and most profitable video game publisher, topping even mega-publisher Electronic Arts. The group was eager to point out that Blizzard's release history alone features four of the five best-selling PC games of all time, including over 56 million units sold since 1995. The last time we received an obligatory World of Warcraft subscriber update, the game had topped nine million players. In the conference it was revealed that they're currently sitting around 9.3 million, a relatively small (though still impressive) bit of growth in the past five months.

Though there's a bit more detail in 1UP's interview with him from yesterday, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime also spoke on some specifics regarding the company. Alongside confirming that the company will "continue supporting WoW with free content," he revealed that they are looking into expanding into additional markets with the hit MMORPG, including Russia and India. Morhaime said that he believes the new relationship with Activision provides an "opportunity to unlock the value hidden inside Blizzard," going on to say that "shareholders of Vivendi weren't giving proper credit to the business we'd built" since Vivendi Games was such a small part of the company. Morhaime also reiterated that Blizzard currently has "no plans on the console side" but that "if we were to release anything on consoles, that would be managed by Blizzard."

Speaking more directly about Activision, their CEO Robert Kotick revealed plans to bring Guitar Hero and other key Activision franchises to Korea and general Eastern markets -- as task that he said would be aided by Blizzard's success in that region. Kotick revealed the unsurprising existence of Call of Duty 5 and Guitar Hero IV, listing both games as in the pipeline alongside a James Bond game, new DreamWorks titles, new Marvel titles, and a Bizarre-developed racing game, moving Activision into "the largest genre that we do not participate in today." None of these future titles are big surprises, but at least no one has to worry that the Call of Duty or Guitar Hero franchises will die.

Kotick revealed a final note of interest near the end of the conference call. Responding to a shareholder question, he said the intent was to have a total headcount of around 6,000 employees for Activision Blizzard, half of which he said will be engaged in development. As a point of comparison, Activision's company profile on the Yahoo stock page states that they had just over 2,100 employees in 2006. Vivendi Games's probably slightly less trustworthy listing on Wikipedia suggests that they employ about 3,400 people, bringing the grand total of the two to 5,500.