Activision-Blizzard is an American video game holding company based in Santa Monica, California. It is the parent company of publishers Activision Publishing (also known simply as Activision), Blizzard Entertainment and King among others. It was founded in 2008 through a merger of Activision and Vivendi Games.
Under its Activision arm, the company is best known for the best-selling first-person shooter franchise Call of Duty as well as the catalogue of commercially successful franchises from Blizzard Entertainment and Candy Crash by King. Since 2008, it also owns the rights to the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon franchises, previously published by Sony Interactive Entertainment and developed by its eventual subsidiaries Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games.
From 2014 to 2019, Activision acted as the publisher for Bungie's Destiny franchise, following the two companies signing on a ten-year contract in 2010. In 2019, Bungie terminated its contract with Activision, and was acquired by Sony in 2022.
In relation to Sony and PlayStation, Activision has released multiple titles for PlayStation systems since the brand's inception. Through the eighth console generation and the early ninth generation, Activision signed several contracts with Sony for timed exclusive content and marketing rights for titles within the Call of Duty, Destiny and Crash Bandicoot . Sony was also the publisher of several of said titles in Japan.
In January 2022, Microsoft announced its intentions to acquire Activision-Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The acquisition was completed on October 13, 2023.