Hooligans of the Night

EA is getting better and better... ActiBliz is getting worse and worse. (Pretty damn good Penny Arcade strip to follow.)

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_in...tory=20984

Gamasutra: "Kotick: Vivendi Titles Dropped Due To Lack Of Sequel Potential"
A lack of cross-platform sequel potential is apparently the reason Activision Blizzard let go of Vivendi Games titles such as Ghostbusters, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand and Brütal Legend.

CEO Bobby Kotick spoke on the subject for the first time in the company’s earning call, following the publishing of its third quarter results yesterday.

Although no titles were referred to by name, he was asked why he had "de-emphasised" some Vivendi Games brands following the merger.

"With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform, with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of, over time, becoming $100 million-plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us," Kotick said in the Gamasutra-attended call later transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

"It’s something that we have been very disciplined about. So, while there are lots of promise for a lot of these products that we had in the portfolio, I think, generally, our strategy has been to focus -- especially given the increase in development expenditures on the products that have those attributes and characteristics that we know if we release today, we’ll be working on 10 years from now."

Ghostbusters and The Chronicles of Riddick have since reportedly been picked up by Atari, while THQ has confirmed that it will publish the new 50 Cent game. Double Fine Production’s Brütal Legend is the only game from the group of orphaned titles currently without a publisher.

Titles from Vivendi Games which Activision Blizzard did choose to retain include Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Prototype, and an unannounced title.

Added Kotick, "'Narrow and deep' has been essential to our strategy of how you expand operating margins. The difficulty in establishing new franchises or unproven franchises, as we have seen over the last 20 years -- that is one of the great challenges of the business, and I think that you have a less-than-accepting and tolerant retail environment.”

He continued: "It’s harder to attract development talent to projects that are more speculative in the long run, and so what we found is that if you have a [need] for innovation in existing franchises, that’s a recipe for margin expansion."

"You still need to have production of new original intellectual property, but you need to do it very, very selectively. And if you look at the number of new original intellectual properties successfully launched in the market each year over the last five or ten years, it’s a small, single-digit number."

The Activision CEO concluded: "We happen to have a number [of these original IPs] in development ourselves, but the focus is... at retail, and generally for the consumer... to continue to be on the big, narrow and deep, high-profile release strategy."

Bare in mind that studios tend to lay off the dead wood once the product cycle starts to wind down and they've released a bunch of games. Drive down costs by getting rid of excess contract staff hired on for the final few milestones in a project. In a few months EA will be hiring again and there's always other studios.


As for Activision/Blizzard this just isn't a surprise, at least they're open with it. As much as we all love this new EA their sole goal is to do exactly the same thing, create some new IPs that they can franchise the shit out of all the while pumping out the tried and true hits. Rockband 2 is already out, we've got Skate 2 on the way, I wouldn't be surprised to see sequels for Army of Two, Dead Space or Mirror's Edge in a year or so. I'm not complaining at this point but where's the difference?

As long as they introduce new IPs that they can pump out annually I'm pretty cool with that. Generally we get one or two sequels before we start feeling burnt out, they simply turn really shitty and gimmicky, or they change shit up in big ways to reinvent the franchise. In the first two cases we hopefully see the franchises die when people stop buying them and in the last case scenario we all win as they get a winning title back out to the public.

Activision/Blizzard has a good cash cow with WoW which would make it seem they have a little room to take more risks. Let's hope we see some of that, too.

I don't have a problem with them creating new games and then making sequels to them, I just wish they would leave a little more time between sequels, give us time to miss it and want more.

I'm just going to go ahead and quote this entire text and put my name at the top. Thank you very much.

To Wibble, I'd be fine if they did that but... they Ghostbusters go and the second Riddick game. Both games, to me, that could've been built on and they just cut'em loose!

Wilco, I agree. Tony Hawk is RIDICULOUS.

What's funny about this is Riddick and 50 Cent are both sequels, one to a critically lauded game, the other a commercial hit. Technically these sequels make them franchises and they still got dropped. I guess it's that there can't be yearly iterations of these games that's the problem.