Talking to Industry Gamers, Activision’s publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg gets real about the space between public perception and managing a successful business – something that is perhaps too easily discarded when it comes to prevailing gamer sentiment. After all, what does the average gamer know about running a multinational, multimillion dollar corporation, anyway?

“You have to make some tough decisions sometimes. Sometimes, really talented people get caught up in those, unfortunately,” he says, with regard to staff layoffs and studio closures under the company. “We have to manage our slate; we have to decide which genres and categories we want to try to compete in. We also have to monitor and take a good hard look at the marketplace results and make the right decisions for our business.”

Throughout most of the early and mid-nineties, EA was generally considered the “Evil Empire” of the industry, a prejudice that has stubbornly, even pointlessly persisted despite the publisher putting out critically acclaimed and immensely popular games like Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, Mass Effect, Rock Band, and Battlefield: Bad Company. It’s somewhat comparable, maybe, to hating and boycotting a record company, to the spurious discredit of its artists. 

There’s certainly no denying Bobby Kotick says some extraordinarily stupid things from time to time, but he’s not Activision’s only employee. Although it’s kinda fun to Photoshop horns onto him, anyway. He just has the right cheekbone structure for it.

“”I have Google, just like everybody else, and I’m of course aware of what the reputation is amongst core gamers, and there’s a narrative that I think has taken over reality to a certain extent,” adds Hirshberg. “I think there’s definitely some disconnect between the perception and the reality. I would give you a couple of thoughts on that. If you go back in a time machine and read the general tenor in the blogosphere a couple of years ago about Sony PlayStation, it sounds a lot like what people are saying about Activision today. There’s a lot of disappointment in the PS3, and it was overpriced, and they’ve given up on the core gamer, and Sony Blu-ray… all those complaints were out there. It takes time sometimes to win people’s hearts and minds.”