Activision head Bobby Kotick is notorious for ruthlessly pursuing profit margins, exploiting IPs to their fullest and extracting every possible dollar from each release, all whilst leaving behind rage-inducing quotes like a trail of breadcrumbs for his overworked PR managers. Love or hate him, the man has proven his ability to have a keen eye for money-making opportunities.
It comes as somewhat of a surprise then that the Activision head has revealed that the company is working on Facebook gaming. In the past, Kotick has publicly discussed his disinterest in mobile and social gaming, saying that the limited opportunity in those sectors renders them a poor investment.
It would appear Kotick is now, however, eating his words, telling Forbes, “Sometimes we need some kind of a specialized skill –like right now there is a lot of work being done on Facebook games. We’ve always been a platform agnostic company, we’ve always said, if you have a platform and you have a big enough installed base of that platform we’ll evaluate it as an opportunity to make games on. And Facebook, with 750 million users, clearly has enough of a platform. The challenge always is, can you deliver a shareholder return by investing in said platform, and in the case of Facebook we think we can.”
Perhaps the video game mogul was simply biding his time to see how the platform develops – but this act of caution may have left Activision behind, as EA has been diving in headfirst, most noticeably through a recent acquisition of Popcap.
Kotick went on to talk about the difficulties in finding competent developers to work on the Facebook platform, “The skills that are required to do social games on a Facebook platform include analytical skills that are different than what we have in our business intelligence unit today. So we’ve had to go out and find people who have these unique kinds of skills –and there are very few of them that actually have proven their skills.”
When Activision commits to something, they usually get results. They may be lagging behind other heavyweights such as EA for the moment, but it would be wise for those companies not to rest on their laurels.
Kotick admits Activision working on Facebook games << Comments and view
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