What would you say

Who is the king?

Who is the Duke?  Hint: He never made a western.

Who is the Count? Hint: He DID make a western (that rules out the Count of Monte Cristo).

Now here is a hard one. Who is the most hated man in America? As you can see in the picture above, at least for the moment there are three possible answers.  First is Jesse James (no not the western outlaw but he claims to be one of his relatives). I am, of course, speaking about the man who cheated on Sandra Bullock, who described himself as the most hated man in America. The second (and in my book most likely) candidate is the CEO of BP Oil – the company that brought you the massive oil slick killing off the wildlife and economy along the Gulf of Mexico.  Yes the man whereof I speak is none other than Tony Hayward.

The last man is the subject of an interview that Kotaku.com sent out in their newsletter.  The article was entitled, “A Delightful Chat with the most with the most hated man video games.” Now for those of you who think that Messer Kotick should be at the top of our “most hated” list it seems to me that he can’t hold a candle to the CEO of BP Oil and our own personal favorite, Senator Joe Lieberman – the man intent on putting a kill switch on the internet .

So is Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, really misunderstood?  He thinks so at least. Here is a quote from the article (this was emailed to us so we do not have an online source for you):

The negative image, the hate for Kotick among some gamers is driven by several things, Kotick tells me. Being the top person at the top third-party game developer brings with it a certain level of attention and animosity. And it doesn’t help that Kotick can be quite colorful in the way he talks to analysts. “There are four to five things that I’ve said that can totally be taken out of context,” he said. “Like ‘Taking the fun out of making video games.’ I’ve used that line for a really long time with the investment community to explain that ‘Hey, we’re mindful of our responsibility to provide a return to our investors.’”

“It was kind of like a joke!”

Kotick’s inflammatory comments, like that he would charge more for a game if he could, come often because he forgets the size of his audience when he’s talking during a panel or investor call. He doesn’t seem to grasp just how closely people follow him these days.

“The world has changed,” he tells me, defending his word choice. “I never really think to edit what I’m saying because it’s going to be taken out of context because somebody’s going to hear it in a different way. But you don’t build a successful business by overcharging your customers. And you certainly don’t build a successful business that requires a tremendous amount of creativity and inspiration and innovation by figuring out how to take the fun and joy out of what people do. It’s like an obvious thing to me to think if you hear something like that; you’re going to think it’s funny, it’s not meant to be serious.”

I’m not totally sold on what Kotick is selling and I tell him so. You can’t use a word like exploit and expect people not to be riled up by it, I point out.

Do you, I ask Kotick, sometimes say these things because you want a reaction? Maybe you’re poking the Internet to see what happens.

“No, I’m not like that,” Kotick says. “I love to poke people to get a reaction but monetization, exploit, those are the words the investment community uses.

“You know what, I look at that and say, exploit is a bad choice of words. I don’t mean that to be that way, I was not thinking about it in a way, or using it in a way that it was misconstrued. I actually think there’s a better choice of words that more accurately describes what I was thinking at the time. It’s not a big deal.”

The hate mail, the negative articles in blogs and the pictures quickly hit home when Kotick started seeing them.

“Oh yeah, I think [gamers' perspective of me] is totally inaccurate,” he says.

So is Messer Kotick simply misunderstood? He is, perhaps, a victim of a public image that, consciously or not, he has woven himself.  More than once we here on the NPNM team have met someone whose public persona was entirely different from the private person (and not necessarily better). For better or worse, whether the public image Mr. Kotick portrays is earned or not (and we will likely never really know) the fact remains that public trust is an elusive quality.  It is something that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and once lost nearly impossible to get back.

 Side Notes

One of our favorite web sites, Terra Nova (it always makes us think) has an entry from Dr. Richard Bartle. It is basically a youtube video of a young man who’s girlfriend deleted all his WoW characters because she was “sick of it”. We have to agree, as Dr. Bartle and others indicate, that the video looks like a put on. However, the question Dr. Bartle asks is an interesting one:

“So, if he sued her, what would the legal arguments involve?” – Dr. Bartle

If it isn’t painfully obvious by now, no one on staff here is a lawyer (although I understand our own Sister Julie has studied Tort Law) so no one here can answer the question.  What the video does put us all in mind of is a television “chat show” we saw some time ago that featured a girlfriend who was tired of her boyfriends WoW habit.  On the show the boyfriend shreaded the wow disks to the happy applause of the audience – all the while the gamers watching the tube just snickered, realizing this wouldn’t stop the boyfriend from playing WoW at all.

Free Find

We just found this over at our favorite website that makes us think (yes we occassionally just sit down and talk to each other believe it or not). It is an article we found over at Terra Nova about Cory Doctorow’s “For the Win”. The best news is that for those of us on a limited budget you can download the book for free and read it.  It free, its a book with a “vision of the near-future MMO landscape” and it sounds like a must read to us. Hells bells we would probably read it just to tick off Garrison Keillor.

No Prisoners, Gnomercy

No Prisoners, Gnomercy

It seems that Sister Julie has finally given in an gone back to World of Warcraft.   She has asked me to pass along that the good sisters have been running on the Alliance side of late, rediscovering the old world. If you want to join them at some point, send us a message.

They said what?

(say what?)

O.K. We admit it. Captain Pike was a star trek captain before captain kirk.

“We didn’t want to have interiors at launch,” said “Star Trek Online” executive producer Craig Zinkievich. “We thought it was just a little bit too much. We really wanted to make sure we delivered a really deep experience, but your bridge not being in the game, it really felt like a hole in the game, and it was just something that we had to put in.” – Craig Zinkievich, Executive Producer, Star Trek Online

Once the game goes live (or if you are amongst the lucky few in the beta  – which we dearly wish we were)  we will all get to choose from among 20 bridge designs.  Mr. Zinkievich said they are to function as social hubs but that’s alright with us. We happen to know Trekkies from all over the world and we have  ALOT of socializing to do!

SAY WHAT!!!

If you are like us, you love down loadable content (DLC)  for your stand alone pc games. Games like Fall Out 3 come immediately to mind.  If you are also like us, you get so tired of having to jump through hoops, open multiple accounts (which invariably generate spam) all just to buy said DLC.   We also get just a bit tired of having to buy content for ”points” which never seem to come in the same increments in which the content is sold (here is looking at YOU Microsoft).  Always, of course, necessitating buying more “Points” than is necessary to purchase the game. 

Wait! 

Gamestop to the rescue!!

According to a report in Arstechnica (who gets their information from Variety Magazine) “ the retailer will start selling digital content in its stores starting next year, and it already has backing from Sony and Microsoft. The new service will allow customers to pay for the content in store and then download it when they return home.”  You can read the article here.

SAY WHAT?

Remember how, just before the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) was released, Activision/Blizzard head honcho Bobby Kotick caused a bit of a stir by saying he would  “raise the price [of MW2] even further if [he] could?”  Now that many players are up in arms (or not up in arms if they didn’t buy MW2) we all know why Mr. Kotick wanted that price raised. Here is an excerpt from article (below) over at Gamesindustry.biz (available here):

“Activision CEO Robert Kotick has exercised options on just over 1.93 million shares this week, allowing him to buy them at a price of USD 1.03 and sell them at between USD 11.43-11.54 each.” – Phil Elliott, Gamesindustry.biz

And a quick note, that puts the stock mentioned above worth around $20 million.

SAY…IT ISN’T SO…

Say it isn’t so…the endless trial (and tribulations) of Warhammer Online.  We had such high hopes! Paul Barnett was on our show several times! As we have said before, Paul Barnett could sell ice to polar bears in the dead of winter.  We are wondering if even he can sell the general gaming public on this:

Endless? We hope!

Warhammer Online is one of the subjects we discuss with JMO and TIPPA on Show 48 (due out soon…we promise). Even though we are always ones to say “don’t nail the coffin lid shut just yet” on any game, this confirmation of the “endless trial subscription” coupled with the news of the 80 layoffs over at Mythic (we hoped that news wasn’t true either) doesn’t bode well for the future of the game.  While any discussion on the WarhammerOnline and what happened between the glory days of launch and now could fill a book (or at least several articles) the general feeling at the end of show 48 was that Mythic tried too hard to please World of Warcraft customers and not enough to please fans of the table top game.  

In the end, what we here at No Prisoners, No Mercy hope is that Mythic (or what ever EA calls them these days) will take a hint from Turbine and go the way of DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online) and be free to play with some sort of micro-transaction business model.  The big question here is, of course, how do you keep them down on the virtual warhammer online farm after they have seen the latest MMOs.  THAT, my friends, is always an enormous task.

See you online,

The No Prisoners, No Mercy team.  

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