If you’re reading this article, chances are pretty good that you’ve played an entry from the fantastic Orange Box. Maybe you’ve hurled electricity in Infamous, or headshot your best friend in Resistance. Perhaps you’ve leveled up in Borderlands, and even chainsawed a Locust in Gears of War. Awesome games, right?
Well, not according to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. Speaking at the America Merrill Lynch Media, Comms and Entertainment conference, Bobby sung the praises of Activision’s new developer Bungie. In doing so however, Kotick managed to discredit the hard work of every other independent developer on the planet:
I don’t want to downplay the talent and importance of Bungie. They make quality games. Check out Game Rant’s review of Halo: Reach for proof. But to call them the last remaining high quality indie developer? C’mon, Bobby. Valve, Insomniac, Sucker Punch, Gearbox, Ninja Theory, and countless other independent developers have produced titles that will never leave my gaming collection.
“Bungie are a very unusual company. They’re probably the last remaining high quality independent developer. It’s very hard to [pauses]… 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 realized 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 organize them… how you use CRM tools in delighting and satisfying the expectations of your audiences.. it’s something no other company [Bungie] talked to [could offer].”
One wonders if the CEO of the biggest publisher in the world secretly likes being the target of the worst insults that the internet’s gaming forums can come up with. Perhaps Mr. Kotick should spend less time figuring out a way to charge for cutscenes, and more time sampling the amazing games that other indie developers have crafted for us - surely he could learn a thing or two.
What do you think about Activision’s CEO, Ranters? How would you praise a developer you’ve entered into an exclusive partnership with? Do you think their deal with Activision will be the downfall of Bungie? Hit us up in the comments below.
Source: CVG
