Bobby Kotick Insults Every Indie Developer, Their Moms, Pets, Grandparents, etc...

[Shawn Zipay]

Activision CEO, Bobby "Nickel and Dime 'Em" Kotick, is at it again. This time he's taken to insulting every independent developer in the world with the exception of Bungie.

That's right fans of Valve, Sucker Punch, Epic, Insomniac, and countless others, Kotick doesn't respect you.

Why is Bungie in his good graces? It might have something to do with the two companies having a new 10-year partnership that will see Activision publishing Bungie's next "action universe." This is widely believed to be a new MMO from the studio.

"Bungie are a very unusual company," Kotick told the America Merrill Lynch Media, Comms and Entertainment conference.

"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 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 [Bungie] talked to [could offer]."

You say classy there, Kotick. You stay classy.

[CptainCrunch]

Re: Bobby Kotick Insults Every Indie Developer, Their Moms, Pets, Grandparents, etc..

Of course he will bash everyone else. The independant developer goes against the entire Activision business model. Making games are not fun.

Crunch

[Lt.Hanley]

Re: Bobby Kotick Insults Every Indie Developer, Their Moms, Pets, Grandparents, etc..

hahahahahha i would pay 60$ for valve game before anonther game published by activision

[Stev0esque]

Re: Bobby Kotick Insults Every Indie Developer, Their Moms, Pets, Grandparents, etc..

My request to shoot kotick still stands

[[GCA]Tim270]

Re: Bobby Kotick Insults Every Indie Developer, Their Moms, Pets, Grandparents, etc..

Since when was Halo ever quality?

[TheHeartSmasher]

Re: Bobby Kotick Insults Every Indie Developer, Their Moms, Pets, Grandparents, etc..

Since when was Halo ever quality?

Since the first Halo on XBOX, as it was one of the best FPS for the console world (not in the PC world though) up there with Rainbow Six 3 and Rainbow Six 3:Black Arrow. As a quality game is something that looks great for it's time, has good replay value, the ability to get you hooked and excited just like movies, cars, etc. do that can create a large fanbase/communities quickly and last more then a year and contains little to no bugs that would cause issues playing the game.

[Stev0esque]

Re: Bobby Kotick Insults Every Indie Developer, Their Moms, Pets, Grandparents, etc..

^sadly, that is business for: Take it, and screw it up in the future and milk the franchise for all it's worth and still be able to bath in your earnings and wipe your @ss with $100's

[TheHeartSmasher]

Re: Bobby Kotick Insults Every Indie Developer, Their Moms, Pets, Grandparents, etc..

^sadly, that is business for: Take it, and screw it up in the future and milk the franchise for all it's worth and still be able to bath in your earnings and wipe your @ss with $100's

In the end it is all still a for profit business and the goal is to make a profit. Now with many game publishers/developers they made their first profit but started to move drastically away from what made them popular in the beginning which is what many consumers do not like in the game industry. Let’s take a title that has gone through major changes like the COD series that have changed many of the franchise fans the recent games developed after the xbox erra, Mortal Kombat.

Mortal Kombat is something that almost everyone knows about in some way or another even if they did not play the game but the chances are they have played it or seen it at some time or another. Their main customer base are people that enjoy playing graphic fighting games that had many things to do in them that was quick and fun. This quality (what defined the game and brought in the fans) lasted from Mortal Kombat I all the way up to Mortal Kombat Trilogy. Once MK4 was released and they started going 3D the quality of the game dropped and got even worse when they released Mortal Kombat vs D.C. Universe which killed the all favorite and expected extremly graphic fighting game that we all know and love to appeal to the more general casual fighting game player (the button smashers and simple minded gamers).

Now they are going to be returning to the classic way of doing things (the new Mortal Kombat, think of it as Mortal Kombat developers waking up and seeing the light again as they did from Mortal Kombat to Mortal Kombat Trilogy) but still keeping the game 3D with the main 2D camera view and bringing back the graphic fighting that made the game so popular to begin with. Should it have taken so long to go from them developing hardcore fighting games to softcore fighting game back to a hardcore fighting game no.

Sometimes in the industry companies want to try new things which is understandable and needed at times to try and bring in new streams of revenue to continue to make a profit or bring in enough money for new projects or maintain existing projects (STEAM, TF2, CSS, etc. are examples of companies trying new things).

Now with Bobby Kotick, he is the CEO and President of Activision and a board member of Activision Blizzard, which in that position does give him the ability speak about things that may or may have been a result of certain actions/policies/etc. that he has created or changed within the company and the monetary results from those actions. Now with the insults towards indie developers and family is a very low blow and would have been something he should have kept to himself.

Now if the majority of gamers were serious about not liking certain actions of what he has done and really want to do something about it they would not buy the games published by Activision. After all you cannot exploit a $100 million dollar franchise over a long period of time if no one buys it or the number of people purchasing the produced games is too low to make a greater return on the money invested in producing those games. There is a very high demand of fun games but the supply of actual fun games is very low currently at least for the FPS genre in 2010.

So Bobby being the business man that he is has been very successful at his job and has been paid very handsomely for the job well done. He knows what he is doing and this has been shown. Now is this the best way of doing it, probably not which is why many of us gamers dislike him and Activision, but if a gamer really dislikes the company they will use their money to speak and spend it elsewhere. I remember people saying they dislike this and that for MW2 but they still went out and purchased the game which nullified what they were saying as their actions spoke a different story.

If gamers really wanted mod tools and publicly available dedicated servers they would not purchase games that did not offer these features out of the box and make sure their friends didn't do so either. In business your actions speak louder than words and as the consumer majority they speak with what they purchase. If they don't like a product they complain about it which is what should be done so the publisher of that product can take in the feedback and work on making changes to please the customers.

[Spik3d]

Re: Bobby Kotick Insults Every Indie Developer, Their Moms, Pets, Grandparents, etc..

I like the jackass thread tag.

Anyway, looks like he's trying to drive the company into the ground.