In between the various trillion things I had to do today, I got a chance to jump on a conference call with Chris Grant at Joystiq and some other smart folks, and blimey, there's a podcast that resulted, with info as follows:

"The Joystiq Podcast Roundtable returns to dissect the latest megatons in the video game industry. This installment we're talking about the new corporate entity of Activision Blizzard ... err, Blizzavision ... err, Actiblizzard? Whatever you call it, it's complicated.

To make sense of the deal, and its ramifications, we've assembled an all star panel. Seated at the roundtable are James Brightman, Lead Business Editor for Game Daily BIZ; Simon Carless, [Publisher] of the CMP Game Group (think Game Developer Magazine and Gamasutra.com); and lastly the alphabetically prejudiced Michael Zenke, Editor at Slashdot Games, blogger at Joystiq's own Massively.com, as well as blogger at his own MMOGNation.com. Topics discussed include Blizzard's independence, Activision's gains, Sierra's status, the possibility of console games from Blizz, the possibility of MMOs from Activision, and whether or not EA needs some new drawers, so give it a listen."

Possibly the most controversial thing I said on the podcast was that I'm wagering that Blizzard's mystery third team is working on a new iteration of Diablo for both PC and console. Of course, I have no proof or inside knowledge of this - I'm just hazarding a guess, in a vain attempt to be the next big game industry analyst. It's either that or a restarted version of Warcraft Adventures, anyhow.