Ever since Vivendi Games and Activision merged into Activision|Blizzard (ATVI) back in '08, it has been interesting to speculate what cross pollination possibilities would come of the marriage.

After all, big corporations love to stress how they can squeeze out shareholder value by learning the best practices of any one division and sharing them with their other groups. So we have been biding our time waiting for the squeezing to begin.

Recent events seem to suggest that most of the lessons at ATVI are coming from Blizzard.

CoD.net?

The last ATVI corporate earnings call saw the company muse about creating a new Call of Duty digital platform, whose intent will be to create for a nexus for Activision's Call of Duty players, in the same way that Blizzard's Battle.net is a locus for StarCraft II fans.

CoDCon 2011?

Unsurprisingly, we now hear faint rumblings that Call of Duty will borrow another Blizzard staple...say hello to CoDCon?

CoDCon would be akin to BlizzCon of course, the annual convention that is hosted by Blizzard Entertainment to market their big franchises: StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo. BlizzCon is typically held in October every year in Anaheim, California, and for a mere $175 US you can course through the temple of Blizzard gaming. Too lazy to travel? For as little as $40, you can watch BlizzCon on your very own home TV - thank you DirectTV!

Well, BASHandSlash.com has heard that something similar to BlizzCon, let's call it CoDCon, is currently being planned for Los Angeles in September. The details are a bit sketchy, but we've heard rumors that this will be a big splashy affair.

Those rumors suggest that competitive CoD will be featured there and that Black Ops will be played on both Consoles and PC's for big cash prizes during the event.

Undoubtedly, MW3 will be nearly ready to go in September (heck...it's playable now as an alpha near-beta version) and thus will obviously be showcased at the event.

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