Bobby Kotick has been nominated as a finalist for the 2008 MarketWatch CEO of the Year award for his genious talent to create the Activision Blizzard merger which easily and one-handedly dethroned EA, with more than twice the profitability. Activision Blizzard is predicted to generate $4.7 billion in revenue during the 2008-2009 Fiscal year. A 60% increase of what Vivendi Games generated as a stand-alone company. Not bad considering the government just acknowledged the country has been in recession for the past 12 months. Big pat on the shoulder to Bobby and Mike Morhaime.
When Mike Morhaime first met Kotick, he was looking for a low-key setting to avoid sparking the sort of chatter that often emerges when high-profile business leaders meet in public.
Morhaime, then the chief executive of Blizzard, chose a steakhouse near his company's Irvine, Calif., headquarters. But he ended up booking a large banquet room by mistake, leaving the two alone and rather conspicuous for the nearly four hours during which they contemplated the potential of a merger creating a new leader in the video-game business -- a combination that would rival Electronic Arts in size and market position.
"We wanted to keep it low-key, which was pretty hard to do in this huge room with just the two of us there," Morhaime recalled with a laugh.
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