Handbags at 10 paces!
Yesterday Activision Blizzard CEO and beloved industry dark-lord Bobby Kotick went on camera with CNBC to discuss a bunch of stuff. One of the things Kotick said during the interview was rather dismissive about the EA Battlefield franchise and its upcoming Battlefield 3 FPS; a game which is pitted in direct competition to Activision’s Modern Warfare 3 this holiday season.
“We just want to stay true to the interest of the Call of Duty fans and we try to not get distracted by what people are doing. I can’t objectively tell you what I think of other products until I see them. Battlefield I’ve only seen on a PC and nobody’s seen it on a console yet. Most of our consumers play games on a console. Until I see it on a console, I wouldn’t be objective on commenting on it,” said Kotick.
“If it’s just a PC title as it looks like today, that’s a very small audience to participate, but we always are interested to see what our competitors are doing,” he continued.
“So far every one of our sequels has performed better than our prequels by meaningful amounts. The demand that we’re seeing on this game is unlike we’ve seen ever, and not by a little. If you look at the pre-orders, if you look at the number of people that have signed up for the beta test, if you look at things like Google searches of Modern Warfare, these are numbers that we’ve never seen before,” said Kotick.
Global simultaneous panty-bunching ensued. Vitriolic fanboys from both camps took to the internet to maturely discuss the merits/flame each other over Kotick’s opinion. This can be evidenced in the comments and forum discussion attached to MyGaming’s original coverage of Kotick’s statement.
Not one to shy away from gaming industry smack talk, EA CEO John Riccitiello hit back in a response issued to Reuters.
“It’s the beginning of the war and [Kotick] recognizes they’re going to be threatened. We’re going to have a clash of the titans this fall. The very fact that he’s trying to cast doubt on our game is a perfect example of how we got his goat. In terms of where this goes, we think our PS3 game is better than their Xbox game and our PC game is better than their PC game. If that’s all he’s got to say, it’s obviously going to evaporate as we launch all three. If you went to our [e3 2011] press conference, you saw the PS3 footage and the Xbox footage. If Bobby thinks that’s PC footage, he’s in real trouble,” said Riccitiello.
More fuel for the flames. Have at it folks.
EA CEO: “If Bobby thinks that PC footage, he’s in real trouble” << Comments and views
