By this time, Activision had built or developed games for every lucrative product category in the market except one-the so-called “ massively multiplayer” games in which players pay monthly subscription fees to enter online worlds and build characters over the course of months or even years. The attractiveness of the category is obvious: Whereas a console game might command a one-shot retail price of $40, an online multiplayer game might charge $15 a month to each of several million players In December 2007, therefore, Activision announced a strategic move that would immediately transform it into a major player (so to’ speak) in the multiplayer category-a merger with the game –making unit of the French entertainment conglomerate Vivendi. Vivendi was big, but it had only one blockbuster game-the world’ number-one online multiplayer franchise, called World of Warcraft. Developed by a Vivendi-owned California studio called Blizzard, World of Warcraft had 11 million subscribers and , with$1.1 billion in annual sales, was perhaps the most profitable video game ever invented. The merger, according to Kotick, was Activision’s best strategy for making a critical move in an industry increasingly dominated by internet-based innovations ; ‘’We looked every which way to figure out how to participate in what Blizzard had created. We couldn’ t find a way to duplicate it, but we could acquire the expertise,” explained Kotick, who added that acquiring World of Warcraft and the knowhow of Blizzard had saved Activision another $150 million in development costs.