Regardless of what many gamers might think of Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, he’s always good for a laugh. This week he was out in full force, letting the gaming world know exactly what it’s like to view the world through his Activision-brand rose-tinted goggles.
So, Activision is doing extremely well, due in no small part to their merger with Blizzard and their cash cow IP’s. Kotick’s latest scheme to suck as much money from unquestioning gaming consumer drones? Sell them cutscenes from video games as a full length movies.
Charging for movie versions of game cutscenes
Speaking at the America Merill Lynch Media, Comms and Entertainment conference, and using StarCraft II’s high quality cutscenes as an example, Kotick described his vision: “If we were to go to an audience and say ‘We have this great hour and a half of linear video that we’d like to make available to you at a $20 or $30 price point,’ you’d have the biggest opening weekend of any film ever.”
“Within the next five years, you are likely to see us do that. It might be in a partnership with somebody or alone, but there will be a time where we’ll capitalize on the relationship we have with our audience; deliver them something that is really extraordinary and let them consume it directly through us instead of theatrical distribution. If we were to deliver a film digitally this way, I’d say an extremely high percentage would then go to the theatre and watch it again,” Kotick envisioned.
Bungie is the last high quality indie developer
Kotick, dropped another bombshell, by saying that developer Bungie is “probably the last remaining high quality independent developer.” He also described Bungie as “a real company.”
Activision has secured a ten year publishing deal with Bungie, which has just wrapped things up with Microsoft after the highly successful Halo: Reach launch. It’s sensible for Kotick to sing the praises of the studio, but surely he’s taking things a step too far and underestimating the intelligence of anyone who might read or hear his comments.
Arguments about the actual definition of an indie studio aside, developers such as Valve, Epic, and Gearbox might just contend his remarks.
Activision is dominating the online market
Kotick continued with some interesting views regarding the online space, an area in which he believes Activision Blizzard is leagues ahead of all competitors. “The traditional companies – the Electronic Arts, or Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo or Disney – that make console-based video games, are going to really struggle [in future] to figure out how to get into the online business we’re in today,” said Kotick.
Speaking of the advantages of the Activision merge with Blizzard, Kotick said: “We recognized that developing all of the capabilities that Blizzard had ourselves would probably put us in a place where we would have… not [only] a decline in our operating margin, but no operating margin. We would invest billions of dollars in all this online capability – and likely actually not produce a great result.”
“There [was] so much built-up expertise at Blizzard when we did this merger – that we’re now applying to Call of Duty, Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero – that we otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. That puts us in a much better position than many of the very console-dependent companies we used to compete against.”
So, Activision Blizzard doesn’t even have to compete against ‘console-dependent’ companies anymore – they’re that awesome. Kotick did tilt a nod to Facebook, saying that the platform is probably their only online competitor, presumably due the scale of their user base. Activision is “making a lot of investments in that area,” said Kotick.
Is Bobby Kotick overly arrogant, a brilliant business man, or simply seeking attention? Have your say on the MyGaming forum and vote on the poll on the MyGaming front page.
Source: CVG, Industry Gamers
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