It's official: Activision CEO is insane....

[Nightmare Doom]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6226758.html?tag=latestheadlines;title;1

"We have a real culture of thrift. 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."

"We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."

[Butts]

Is that serious?

[myk]

What?

Or then again, this might explain why id sold itself to ZeniMax...

[DuckReconMajor]

I actually had to think for a minute to make sure this wasn't April Fool's Day.

[Sharessa]

Emo CEO cuts his own staff.

[Lord_Z]

I think that guy is a little confused about his goals.

[Da Spadger]

Extra points for honesty.

[fraggle]

Hmm. On the one hand I can understand where he's coming from. The games industry has for a long time been very informal and "fun" - just read the "Masters of Doom" book and all the stories about the crazy things that the Id team got up to, for example. At the end of the day, though, the purpose of a business is to make a profit, so it makes sense to promote the importance of the bottom line. This quote from the article, for example:

"You have studio heads who five years ago didn't know the difference between a balance sheet and a bed sheet who are now arguing allocations in our CFO's office pretty regularly," Kotick said.

The idea of the head of a games studio knowing nothing about finances or how to turn a profit is rather absurd, but also somehow rather unsurprising. I guess the ultimate example is Duke Nukem Forever which went on for years eating up money before it was finally canned. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar lack of financial discipline exists in many other games companies.

That said, it seems like he's being unnecessarily pessimistic about things, or perhaps he's just phrased things wrong. Games are intended to be fun to play, so it makes sense in a way to have a degree of fun in the workplace where they're being created. It's also going to help to have a closely-knit, motivated team if you want to create a good game, so "keeping people focused on the deep depression" certainly isn't going to help there. The fact is that creating a game is a creative process, and the people who do it are creative people. Focusing on profit isn't going to help there.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

Lord_Z said:

I think that guy is a little confused about his goals.

fraggle said:

so "keeping people focused on the deep depression" certainly isn't going to help there. I don't know.

Economic depression = less money spent on travel etc. = more money spent on games and other indoor entertainment.

[DuckReconMajor]

Wikipedia says:
Kotick is a controversial figure in the press and gaming community. This is due to the fact that he is only interested in creating sequels to popular franchises, rather than developing new ones.[6] In responding to why Activision Blizzard chose not to publish certain games, he implied the company is not interested in games that "don't have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million franchises".[7]

Some members of the press openly criticize Kotick. Ars Technica editor Ben Kuchera wrote, "Kotick doesn't play his games, and it shows."[8]

Kotick threatened to pull support from Sony's Playstation 3 console if the company didn't lower its price. Kotick also created a stir when commenting on the financial success of the Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft franchises. Following news that the Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition will cost $149.99, the Tony Hawk: Ride bundle will cost $119.99 and DJ Hero will cost $119.99, Kotick stated to a reporter, "if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further."[9]

[Use]

Da Spadger said:

Extra points for honesty.

That's true, but I'm still thankful I haven't paid money for an Activision game since Doom3...nor will I ever buy one of their games again.

[myk]

fraggle said:
At the end of the day, though, the purpose of a business is to make a profit, so it makes sense to promote the importance of the bottom line.

That problem you're mentioning, game design taken as some kind of extended entertainment party, pretty much got knocked down with Daikatana's fate years ago. Businesses need to profit, grow or sustain themselves, but businesses that give more importance to that than their trade are shooting themselves on the foot, especially if anyone finds out. If Romero was clownish during ION Storm, at least it was all more or less a novelty (something to "try out") for the industry, and he was a producer, but this guy, who doesn't even make games, seems to be acting in more or less the same over-the-top way from the other end, which isn't something new or even charming.

[Sharessa]

fraggle said:

The idea of the head of a games studio knowing nothing about finances or how to turn a profit is rather absurd, but also somehow rather unsurprising. I guess the ultimate example is Duke Nukem Forever which went on for years eating up money before it was finally canned. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar lack of financial discipline exists in many other games companies.

An even better example would be Ion Storm Austin, which collapsed on itself after almost spending a couple years producing vaporware because they were focused first and foremost on having a fun workplace.

That being said, though, I think it's best to have a casual atmosphere when developing games and the like. It really shows through when game companies priorities are all about profit. All the independent developers that were more about making fun games and testing out technologies (like Id, Bullfrog, Blizzard, Cavedog, Black Isle, and the like), are usually considered by gamers to have made some of the best games ever. Soulless game-mills where they have 200 guys in cubicles working 60 hours a week to make something before a certain deadline (I'll use THQ as an example because I have a friend who works for them) just make unimaginative clones of successful games that make them enough profit to justify making more games, but are generally considered terrible or at least dull by most gamers.

Also, a lot of the best selling games ever were pretty imaginative and original. Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros, Doom, Myst, and The Sims all had pretty original game play and made their creators a fortune. Yet I suppose for every Tetris and Sim City there is a Half-Life or Halo which makes an amazing profit by following a certain formula (though I'd also argue that those two games were made by fairly independent teams and were pretty good for their genre).

I think it's pretty clear this guy has never played a god damn video game in his life. He doesn't see games as a form of entertainment so much as a way to make sales. He cares nothing for profit. He reminds me of my bosses and why I never want to work for another corporation after I quit this job. :/

[Graf Zahl]

I wouldn't want to work for such a jerk.

It's obvious that he's not interested in the product at all, just the bottom line. That may work in the short term but sooner or later such a business model will fail because it doesn't produce quality products.

[myk]

About Duke Nukem Forever, there's no proof the issue was just designers who knew little about business because they put the fun factor before it. It seems like a combination of incompetence, lack or initiative and a business scam. Vaporware can be kept rolling just because it makes a company profitable, regardless of the eventual catastrophe, effects of which some shrewd assholes involved might avoid. One thing that seemed clear there was a disruption between the publishers and the game makers. A failure of communication and teamwork. And this guy doesn't seem to show tact in that direction.

If anything, what one can see it bigger corporations taking over many assets. The old independent producers of the '90s video game boom era seem to be dying or getting swallowed by publishers, in the process getting trash-talked as a class by people like Kotick.

[Sharessa]

Graf Zahl said:

I wouldn't want to work for such a jerk.

It's obvious that he's not interested in the product at all, just the bottom line. That may work in the short term but sooner or later such a business model will fail because it doesn't produce quality products.

Exactly, but I don't think guys like that care much because they're shifty enough to jump ship as soon as the company starts going down so they can move on to the next thing. They're nothing more than parasites.

myk said:

If anything, what one can see it bigger corporations taking over many assets. The old independent producers of the '90s video game boom era seem to be dying or getting swallowed by publishers, in the process getting trash-talked as a class by people like Kotick.

The good thing is that independent developers seem to be coming back as a viable business model. Companies like The Behemoth and the like can produce simple, fun games for stuff like mobile phones, XBox Live, and even PCs (via stuff like Pop Cap). The thing that killed independent developers originally were the graphics wars, where each game coming out had to have better and better graphics than the last. Stuff like that was requiring more and more man hours which was easier and cheaper to do when you hire 300 mediocre programmers who can work of 3-4 games simultaneously as opposed to a half dozen guys who don't have free time to produce games in the interim. These days, gamers are starting to get tired of "realism", and there are more non-gamers becoming casual gamers due to the prevalence of computers these days. Both groups want simple, fun games and these can be churned out pretty quickly and easily.

So the future is starting to look good for games and hopefully people like Kotick are a dying breed within the industry.