From Kotick’s point-of-view then Valve, Ninja Theory, Rebellion, Gearbox Software, Insomniac and others are …low quality indie developers?
”Bungie are a very unusual company,” Activision CEO Bobby Kotick told a conference. ”They’re probably the last remaining high quality independent developer. It’s very hard to …that has sort of has institutional skills and capabilities. And they’re a real company.”
”When they started the process of looking for a new partner, they’d been in business with Microsoft. They had a vision for a product they wanted to create that needed certain skills and capabilities - that Microsoft had some of.”
”But as they started to go and look at the obvious candidates, they realised that no company other than Activision had the skills that they needed to be successful for the vision of that product. These are things that you never would have envisioned five years ago.”
”Blizzard had 2,500 people in customer service and support just for World Of Warcraft. How you train them, how you manage them, how you organise them… how you use CRM tools in delighting and satisfying the expectations of your audiences… it’s something no other company talked to” could offer, added Kotick.
While it’s all very nice to compliment your new 10-year publishing partner Bungie, it’s a massive disservice to the many other indie outfits around the globe producing some mighty fine works - Valve in particular comes to mind and is likely the PC crowds number 1.
Kotick recently said Activision would likely be selling repackaged videogame cinematics in about 5 years time as ‘movies’ that would compete with major blockbuster openings.
