bobby-kotick posts

On Monday, word got out on the information superhighway that Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said some not so flattering things about Electronic Arts and developer Double Fine. Naturally the parties involved wanted some time to respond. Gamasutra got some comments from EA's communications VP Jeff Brown. Brown pretty much slams Activision Blizzard's franchise line up and Kotick's involvement with them, stating, " ... one is a fantastic persistent world he had nothing to do with; one is in steep decline; and the third is in the process of being destroyed by Kotick's own hubris." We would assume that the games are World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero and Call of Duty, in that order.

And what about Kotick's comments about Schafer and Double Fine? Eurogamer got Schafer on the horn to state, "It's sad is that instead of just insulting me personally, he goes after the product of my hard-working team - a group of people he almost put out of work a while back." Hopefully this will be the last we hear about this issue, until the next time of course.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is known for giving out opinions and quotes that can ruffle some feathers and hurt some feelings. In a new interview for Edge magazine, Kotick is at it again. In an portion of the interview on the Edge web site. Kotick slams the way Electronic Arts handles its internal developers, saying, "EA will buy a developer and then it will become 'EA Florida', 'EA Vancouver', 'EA New Jersey', whatever. We always looked and said, 'You know what? What we like about a developer is that they have a culture, they have an independent vision and that's what makes them so successful.'" To be fair to EA, they have in fact been renaming developers so they have unique designations (Visceral Games, Danger Close, etc).

Eurogamer has reported on other excerpts from the Kotick interview where he slams Tim Schafer's Double Fine studio. Activision once held the rights to publish the console-only game Brutal Legend and in his one meeting about the the game he was told by his execs, "He's late, he's missed every milestone, he's overspent the budget and it doesn't seem like a good game. We're going to cancel it." He also slams the founders of Infinity Ward, Vince Zampella and Jason West, once again. The creators of the Call of Duty franchise were fired back in March. Kotick claims, "We're a public company, we've got ethics obligations, and the things they did were... I would go to jail if I did them."

Activision Blizzard's CEO Bobby Kotick is known for making some pretty wacky quotes. Recently he seems to made a huge whopper that pretty much slams a ton of great game developers. As reported by Computer and Video Games, Kotick recently stated that in his opinion, the team at Bungie are "probably the last remaining high quality independent developer."

Kotick made those statements last week at the America Merrill Lynch Media, Comms and Entertainment conference, adding that Bungie "sort of has institutional skills and capabilities. And they're a real company." Gee. Do you think Valve, Epic Games, or Gearbox Software, among many others, might have something to say to Kotick about his opinions?

[Via Blue's News]

While some PC gamers have their gaming rigs hooked up to their TV sets, most PC games are still played with a mouse and keyboard and with a small PC monitor. However Activision Blizzard's CEO Bobby Kotick says in a new interview that his company will "very aggressively" support efforts by PC companies to have more gaming PCs hooked up to TVs.

Of course, Kotick isn't doing this just because he's a big supporter of gaming on PCs. In a chat with the Financial Times (free registration required) Kotick states that the publishers get little money from the revenue streams that Microsoft charges for Xbox Live online service for the Xbox 360. He states, "We would really like to be able to provide much more value to those millions of players playing on Live, but it's not our network." He sees gaming PCs, with its more open network architechiture, as a way around it, stating, "If we are going to broaden our audiences, we are going to need to have other devices."

This brings up the idea, which has been reported before, that Kotick is looking to make a MMO based on the Call of Duty shooter franchise. Having a PC running such a game would allow Activision to control the pricing for playing the game online and reap the benefits directly if its successful.

Back in February, Activision Blizzard's CEO Bobby Kotick surprised the attendees at the DICE Summit by announcing that the company planned to launch an indie game competition this year that would be worth a whopping $500,000. At the same time Activision posted up a brief PDF file saying that submissions would begin in March and that the grand prize would be $100,000.

It's been a couple of months since that original reveal and that PDF page has now been edited. There is no longer any mention of the amount of the grand prize. Also we have obviously passed that March date for submissions and the page no longer mentions that date. We contacted Activision's PR rep for more info on the indie games development contest and were told, "We'll have more details for you soon." So hopefully we will get some clarification on their plans in the near future.

The 2010 DICE Summit is well under way and Activision's CEO Bobby Kotick just dropped a huge bombshell during his keynote addess at the event in Las Vegas. According to our sister site Joystiq, he revealed the company's plans to launch a indie games competition with a $500,000 prize purse.

That's all the info that's been released about the contest so far but you can bet that we will be emailing and calling Activision to get more details. Ironically, the DICE Summit is also the place where the Indie Games Challenge, sponsored by GameStop, is scheduled to give out their two $100,000 grand prizes later tonight.

Update: Activision has just posted up a PDF file which gives a little more info about the competition including word that the grand prize will be $100,000. Submissions for the contest will start sometime in early March.

Next month's DICE Summit is already looking like it will be an interesting one and this week the show's organizers announced that one of the summit's keynote speeches will be conducted by Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard. Kotick has been something of a polarizing presence in the game industry. While the publisher has been highly successful even in the face of the current economic recession Kotick has been accused by some of being more interested in making money than publishing good games.

So it's somewhat ironic that the DICE Summit organizers state that Kotick's keynote speech will "talk about how creative talent drives the video game industry." Hmmmm. It won't be about driving franchises into the ground? How odd. The DICE Summit is still scheduled to be held in Las Vegas with Kotick's speech scheduled for February 17.


[Via email press release]

Activision's CEO Bobby Kotick expressed some concern over the nearly-real merger between Electronic Arts and Take Two Interactive, in an interview with Reuters. Regarding the fact that the two companies are the holders of the two biggest sports imprints, EA Sports and 2K Sports, respectively, Kotick said "When you think about one company in control of the sports category, with no competition from anybody else, that could be a challenge."

We think that it's a challenge that could be good for the entire industry. Clearly, with the top two sports franchises under one roof, that allows room for an indie developer to step in and provide the genre something it desperately needs: innovation. Can tennis, at this point, get more tennis-like or realistic? Probably not. So while EA/Take Two manage the iterative task of keeping the common titles updated every year, we look forward to games like "David Blaine's Mysterious Slam Dunk Arena" and "That's Gotta Hurt Combat Karaoke, featuring The Rock".

[Via ars technica]