Lévy recognized Kotick wanted control of "World of Warcraft", and offered to allow the companies to merge, but only if Lévy held the majority shares in the merged group, forcing Kotick to cede control. Kotick fretted about this decision for a while, according to friends and investors. During this time in 2006–2007, some of Activision's former successful properties began to wane, such as "Tony Hawk's", and Activision faced harsher competition from Electronic Arts, who had purchased Harmonix after Activision bought Red Octane as to develop "Rock Band", a competing title to "Guitar Hero". Kotick met with Blizzard's president Mike Morhaime, and learned that Blizzard also had a successful inroad into getting their games into China, a potentially lucrative market. Given this potential opportunity, Kotick agreed to the merger.