I would like to think that we spend a lot of time, and I individually spend a lot of time thinking of ways to reach out to the development community and show that we have respect and complete admiration for what they do on a daily basis,” Winters argued. ”I hope that there aren’t any hard feelings and I hope there isn’t any reluctance - I’ve certainly not felt it directly.
”A business is a tough thing to manage on a number of different fronts, especially when you’re dealing with a creative community like video games or interactive entertainment. Any time that I do hear anything of concern I do try to dispel it. The overall message that I would love people to get out of any time they actually get detailed information about us or my personal approach is that we have admiration and respect for the talent in this industry.
He then claimed that before Activision merged with Blizzard, the publisher was seen as ”warm and cuddly Activision; the scrappy, loveable number two,” though it’s hard to envision caustic and controversial Activision CEO Bobby Kotick as “warm and cuddy” even then, when he was stating, ”The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games” and wanting to cultivate a culture of “skepticism, pessimism, and fear.” Real warm. Real cuddly.