Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business 🍇 for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video 🍇 game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2024.[5]

The company was founded as Activision, Inc. 🍇 on October 1, 1979 in Sunnyvale, California, by former Atari game developers upset at their treatment by Atari in order 🍇 to develop their own games for the popular Atari 2600 home video game console. Activision was the first independent, third-party, 🍇 console video game developer. The video game crash of 1983, in part created by too many new companies trying to 🍇 follow in Activision's footsteps without the experience of Activision's founders, hurt Activision's position in console games and forced the company 🍇 to diversify into games for home computers, including the acquisition of Infocom. After a management shift, with CEO Jim Levy 🍇 replaced by Bruce Davis, the company renamed itself to Mediagenic and branched out into business software applications. Mediagenic quickly fell 🍇 into debt, and the company was bought for around US$500,000 by Bobby Kotick and a small group of investors around 🍇 1991.

Kotick drastically revamped and restructured the company to get it out of debt: dismissing most of its staff, moving the 🍇 company to Los Angeles, and reverting to the Activision name. Building on existing assets, the Kotick-led Activision pursued more publishing 🍇 opportunities and, after recovering from its former financial troubles, started acquiring numerous studios and various types of intellectual property over 🍇 the 1990s and 2000s, among these being the Call of Duty and Guitar Hero series. A holding company was formed 🍇 as Activision's parent company to manage both its internal and acquired studios. In 2008, this holding company merged with Vivendi 🍇 Games (the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment) and formed Activision Blizzard, with Kotick as its CEO. Within this structure, Activision 🍇 manages numerous third-party studios and publishes all games besides those created by Blizzard. In October 2024, Microsoft acquired parent company 🍇 Activision Blizzard, maintaining that the company will continue to operate as a separate business. While part of the larger Microsoft 🍇 Gaming division, Activision retains its function as the publisher of games developed by their studios.

History [ edit ]

Founding (1979) [ 🍇 edit ]