Activision Threatens To Boycott Sony
Activision Blizzard President Robert Kotick isn't afraid to make himself unpopular: from his treatment of the Guitar Hero property to the decision to sue Double Fine over Brutal Legend, Kotick hasn't endeared himself to gamers. The perception that he'll only greenlight sequels to popular franchises - rather than develop new titles - hasn't helped his image.
Another body alienated by Mr. Kotick may be Sony: Kotick threatened that Activision might stop supporting the PS3 because Xbox 360 games generate a substantially better return on investments:
"I'm getting concerned about Sony; the PlayStation 3 is losing a bit of momentum and they don't make it easy for me to support the platform. It's expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better. Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation," he says."They have to cut the price, because if they don't, the attach rates [the number of games each console owner buys] are likely to slow. If we are being realistic, we might have to stop supporting Sony. When we look at 2010 and 2011, we might want to consider if we support the console -- and the PSP [portable] too."
Kotick does quote some sobering numbers: he says Activision paid Sony $500 million last year, and those monies, he said, "probably still worked out at 400 per cent of the profit they made." In reality, Sony lost $597 million last year - meaning, if accurate, that Activision's $500 million might have kept Sony from hitting the ugly $1 billion loss mark.
For all his unpopularity, Kotick is no fool when it comes to business: he's turned Activision from the property he picked up in 1991 for $440,000 into the world's biggest independent video game company, worth $16 billion that generated close to $1 billion in sales in the first quarter of this year.
Titans are often assholes, but that's how they stay titans - is this brutally good business, or just brutal?
Sony should beware -- Activision chief is not simply playing games [TimesOnline]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany on 19 June 2009
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: activision, blizzard, boycott, ps3, rober kotick, sony, xbox 360
Around this time in the last generation, publishers and developers started saying the same thing about the Gamecube... and they were right to do so.
The PS3 is on track for a smaller market share than the Gamecube had, so I think Activision is being pretty reasonable to say, "OK, Sony, do something soon or you're on your own." Nintendo was riding the kid stuff (or what appeared to be kid stuff) too hard back then, while Sony's stuff is overpriced in a down economy and they've lost some exclusives. Merely lowering the price of a PS3 wouldn't help Sony any more than dropping the Gamecube to $99 helped Nintendo; they need to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and the motion control rabbit has already been pulled. So has the virtual world rabbit. So has the user created content rabbit. So has the "gaming as social network" rabbit.
Nintendo fanboys screamed then and Sony fanboys will scream now about how short-sighted and/or mean-spirited it is. Boo hoo. Not every technology purchase you make is going to be the most popular choice, no matter how dominant the company used to be or may be in the future.
Honestly though, Raindog? While it is true that all these different tricks have been pulled and it has seen very little effect on the PS3's sales, unlike the Gamecube (which suffered from a funky, gimicky format and terrible marketing/third party support) the PS3 actually DOES have a lot to drool over, and great potential.
I actually think, unlike the Gamecube, the PS3's Achilles Heel actually *IS* the pricetag. The Gamecube was always the affordable option of its generation in the first place, so of course a price-drop would do little to effect its sales. Price was simply not the problem. But for the PS3? 600$ was ridiculous even BEFORE the economy went kaput, and now their 400$ and 500$ models are just as ridiculous (considering the downgrade in product quality and features since its original incarnation). Top that off with 60-70$ pricetag for all-new games and 50-60$ for controllers/other peripherals and you have a beast of a financial hurdle too high for most consumers to get beyond. Couple that with the idea that a PS3 begs, almost REQUIRES, the investment of an HDTV (which then sends your costs soaring) and you have a fifty foot electrified brick wall instead of a welcome mat.
Simply put- the problems plaguing the Gamecube and PS3 are not the same. While the overall effect seems to be similar, the sources are from two very distinctly different places. One was bad marketing and lack of third party support. The other is the overwhelming price.
I agree fundamentally with Activision's president (which pains me to say considering I think his other actions are disgusting). I've said it from Day 1- the PS3 is a glorious system that will be brought to its knees by its price, and so far this has proven to be the case. And sadly Sony has had a horrible track record of hubris in concern with their inability to recognize this issue and address it in time.
As an owner of a first-gen 60gig PS3 I still keep my fingers crossed that Sony will learn to adapt before their console goes extinct. I'm not counting on it, but hope does spring eternal.
(PS: I was an avid lover of the Gamecube, so my criticisms of the system come from a major fan, not a Sony-lover. I'm actually very unbiased when it comes to which console is best- simply because they all bring something different to the table).
Excuse my language here, but Robert Kotick can fuck off.
It's hard to take anything he says seriously. He has been famously quoted for saying that if a game is not marketable for multiple sequels, then it's not worth making. His exact quote is "we are 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".
That's a great business model, if you happen to be a stanch, money-hungry, conservative republican, which is exactly what Robert Kotick is. He has donated money to only republicans (George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Trent Lott) and conservative issues.
But as a gamer, I refuse to support this train of thought. I stopped buying Activision products after diving deeper into their ways of business. I also started taking notice how year after year, the games they kept releasing were almost the exact same game with the exact same price tag. (Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk, I am looking in your direction...)
Thanks Activision, but really, fuck off...
The man speaks sense, the price of developing for PS3 is ridiculous, and overcomplicated compared to the potential rewards it must be difficult to make a team effectively create a game twice, the 360 and PC architecture aren't similar but certainly work well with porting and specifications, roughly anyway, but the processing scale and abilities of the PS3 are just too much in a lot of cases.
He wants to make money, politics aside that is the only reason to conduct business, bad businessmen and people who don't get it think otherwise, and they go under just as fast.
I wholly see his point and understand what he's saying, Raindog also speaks sense, Gabe Newell is about the only genius left in gaming and he thinks the same, all these smart businessmen aren't wrong.
I have a feeling this will be more of a "He's wrong because he's a republican" then any legitimate criticism of his business acumen.
I'm inclined to agree that this reaction, while coming off slick and corperate IS the very thing a president of a game manufacturing company shold be looking at; the factors that keep the games his company makes from getting to the largest audience. As a consumer, the only thing I have to focus on is whether or not I want and can afford a given game. I find my position much less complicated. Its not the first time I've heard this as a response to Ps3 programming costs, so I assume there's merit to it. Very interesting food for thought on this so far though.