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Posts Tagged ‘Activision’

Activision unhappy with lack of multiplayer revenue

July 5th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

In an interview with the Financial Times (account may be needed to read), Activision CEO Bobby Kotick talked about being unhappy with the fact that Activision doesn’t make any money from Xbox Live subscriptions, despite it’s Call of Duty series being some of the most popular games on the service.

“We’ve heard that 60 per cent of [Microsoft’s] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call of Duty,” says Mr Kotick. “We don’t really participate financially in that income stream. We would really like to be able to provide much more value to those millions of players playing on Live, but it’s not our network.”

Since there isn’t much he (or the company) can do about that, he mused a bit about perhaps making the PC market a bigger piece of the company’s focus.

Mr Kotick sees an opportunity to break the consoles’ “walled gardens with new gamer-friendly PCs, designed to be plugged into the television. PCs have long been used for online play, but PC gaming remains niche when the games industry needs to widen its appeal.

“We have always been platform agnostic,” says Mr Kotick. “[Consoles] do a very good job of supporting the gamer. If we are going to broaden our audiences, we are going to need to have other devices.”

Activision will “very aggressively” support efforts by Dell and HP to connect PCs to TVs.

Now, on the surface this sounds great for PC gamers. Here we have the top guy at one of the biggest publishers speaking out in support of the platform. And yet, considering that it all started with an expression of frustration that Activision can’t monetize multiplayer on the console, one has to wonder what exactly is providing the motivation to looking back at the PC. Could it perhaps be to ‘provide much more value’ to PC gamers via some sort of subscription service for Activision titles, something that has been mused at before with stated desires to sell a subscription model Call of Duty?

Posted in Games

Tags: Activision, Bobby Kotick, Call of Duty, multiplayer revenue, Xbox Live

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Kotick wants subscription based Call of Duty

June 20th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick was asked what immediate change he would make to the company. That led to the following exchange :

WSJ: If you could snap your fingers, and instantly make one change in your company, what would it be, and why?

Mr. Kotick: I would have Call of Duty be an online subscription service tomorrow. When you think about what the audience’s interests are and how you could really satisfy bigger audiences with more inspired, creative opportunities, I would love to see us have an online Call of Duty world. I think our players would just have so much of a more compelling experience.

WSJ: Is that coming?

Mr. Kotick: Hopefully.

WSJ: Are the customers ready for it?

Mr. Kotick: I think our audiences are clamoring for it. If you look at what they’re playing on Xbox Live today, we’ve had 1.7 billion hours of multiplayer play on Live. I think we could do a lot more to really satisfy the interests of the customers. I think we could create so many things, and make the game even more fun to play. We haven’t really had a chance to do that yet, so that would be my snap of the fingers.

Left unclear is whether such a setup would mean customers buying the full game and also paying a monthly fee, or if it would be an entirely fee-based system. The latter could actually make more sense than annual incarnations of the franchise being bought for full price, depending on price point. And since this is the company charging $15 for packs of 5 maps (2 of them recycled CoD 4 content), I wouldn’t be too optimistic of a decent rate.

However, I haven’t exactly seen reams of gamers clamouring for such a set up as Kotick claims, and I would have to be convinced of how it would provide a more compelling experience.

(The original WSJ article is behind a paywall and accessible to subscribers only. However, Google is your friend. Thanks also to VG247).

Posted in Games

Tags: Activision, Bobby Kotick, Call of Duty, subscription based, Wall Street Journal

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Activision jacks up price of first Modern Warfare 2 map pack

March 16th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

Modern Warfare 2’s first map pack is set for release on the Xbox 360 (PC and PS3 releases of the pack are set nebulously as ‘in the future’ for the time being).

Stimulus Package will consist of 5 maps, 3 of them new, and the other 2 rehashed popular maps from Call of Duty 4. Despite the pack consisting of 40% re-used content, the price of the pack is being raised by $5 over packs for CoD 4 and CoD : World at War, checking in at $15.

Yes indeed, $15 for a pack where only 3 of the maps are even new. Is Bobby Kotick angry that Ubisoft has taken the mantle of ‘Most Hated Game Company in Existence’ and willing to do anything to get it back? Or is he some sort of EA sleeper agent, determined to give Bad Company 2 (and it’s upcoming free map pack release) as much good publicity as possible?

Of course, if gamers scoop this sucker up in heaps, the indignation of some won’t mean anything, and a new price point standard will have been set.

Posted in Games

Tags: $15 map pack, Activision, Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2

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Activision to release classic games DRM free on Good Old Games

January 27th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

In an exclusive (that broke even GoG’s own countdown to the announcement of the deal), Cnet has disclosed that the big new deal the Good Old Games site has been counting down to is disclosing an agreement with Activision.

The first two releases will be RPG Arcanum : Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura from 2001 and Gabriel Knight : Sins of the Fathers from 1993. Each game will retail on GoG for $5.99. Both games were originally part of the Sierra catalog, most of which has come under Activision’s control since they closed the studio a year ago.

Considering the back catalog Activison-Blizzard actually has control over, this is a very exciting new addition to the GOG catalog.

To give you an idea of what games we’re talking about, here is a list of Activision’s PC catalog. They are the publisher of most of id Software’s titles, the Call of Duty series, a lot of classic LucasArts titles, and most of the old Sierra and Infocom back catalogs. They also have ownership of Blizzard, so they have their back catalog available as well. That’s a lot of REALLY good games.

Posted in Games

Tags: Activision, Arcanum, DRM free, Gabriel Knight, Good Old Games

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