- Give us a big smile
There is an old joke that can be applied to just about any area of business – in this case it would go something like this…
Question: Why don’t sharks eat business executives?
Answer: Professional Courtesy.
In the world of business, you never know if the big smile that greets you in the morning actually hides a row of shark teeth. Likewise, you never know if someone’s bark is MUCH worse than their bite.
When I was in the military I got to know the commander of the United Nations Honor Guard off duty. Off duty he was the nicest guy you ever want to meet – on duty he would have made General George Patton cringe in fear. In the end, you never know if the “face” that someone presents you is what a friend of mine called their “date face”. The idea is that someone puts on a show, some behavior that they want you to see, that isn’t the real person.
I also had a boss I worked for in the military that described himself as “little Hitler” for reasons of what we shall facetiously call his “sunny disposition.”
So the demeanor that Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision/Blizzard, presented at the “Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference (at least as far as an article at Gamespot.com presents – available here) may be Bobby Kotick’s “date face”.
Let’s hope so.
The article is business as usual until it gets to the end. Then, in what seems to have swiftly become what we can expect from Mr. Kotick, he throws us a few zingers:
“We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”
“The executive said that he has tried to instill into the company culture ‘skepticism, pessimism, and fear’ of the global economic downturn, adding, ‘We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.’”
Yes friends, this is the same Activision/Blizzard executive that just a short while ago confronted the protestations of their customers over the high price planned for their upcoming “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” release by telling us all that if he had his way he would have raised the price even further.
It seems that Bobby Kotick may just be the impetus behind the drive for profit over at Activision/Blizzard these days. Now you might respond to this last sentence by replying, “What’s wrong with a little profit?” My answer would be “absolutely nothing.” I might even quote J. Paul Getty who once said, “Money is only dirty when it is somebody else’s.”
Nope, nothing is wrong with profit. Not just so long as I don’t have to be the person who is, presumably, the beleaguered soul who works directly for him. I really feel for that person, whomever he or she is.
I feel like I have been pimp slapped and I don’t even work there.
See you online,
Julie Whitefeather
He sounds like a real prize. With so much money pouring in from WOW they could have taken this game in the expansion to some higher climbs. They can afford the risk. Instead we’ve seen rampant asset re-use and some lackluster creativity expended in class progression and armor sets suck compared to the vanilla versions. It’s one thing to want a profit. It’s something else to want huge profits. It’s something altogether different to come off as money-grabbing-giggling-all-the-way-to-the-bank. They won’t instantly lose millions of customers over that sort of behavior but over time the trickling out will increase.
I can pretty much assure you that on the corporate level, there probably is not a lot of fun publishing games at Activision but on the Developer level — they still have fun and enjoy their work. Otherwise, their games would suffer and I don’t think there’s very many bad games coming out of Activision these days. It’s management like this that will eventually bring down a strong product line by alienating the community and making developers hate making games for them.
This is your typical C-level publisher officer that wouldn’t know a good game if it bit him in the keester but he can surely help create bad games by cutting budgets, moving ship dates forward and being the general greedy, full-of-himself tightwad that he seems to be.
I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in his leadership making Activision what they are today — it the Development houses and their strong core of creative and engineering people that make Activision strong. Just as much as the community of people that buy their games. If this asshat had his way, fewer people would be buying games since he wants to improve their bottom line (by increasing retail prices) and make the stockholder happy and be damned the people that shell out the cash that keep the Activision revenue stream going.
Just another talking head at a publisher that needs to be ignored.
Now this all makes me wonder where I saw the interview by a dev recently who had the advice: not to trust anyone who wants to enter the mmo industry but does not play games. Also I wonder if Bobby Kotick is just trying to get his name in the news. If so – it works.