An Activision Doom and Gloom Story
I’m opposed to outright predictions. The last time I made one, I reneged on my promise to eat a hat-shaped object. Who knew Blizzard would significantly delay one of their products, anyway!? So uh, let’s try this again.
Activision’s standing as gaming’s biggest publisher is prime to burn.
I’m not arguing the quality of their products; I’m arguing we’ll wake up the morning of an Activision-Blizzard earnings report and discover Bobby Kotick isn’t the genius the mainstream claims. You know, where Forbes incredulously wonders how “a chief executive blind to the beauty of videogames developed an unmatched eye for spotting hits”, and his company “owns a peerless collection of widely beloved and extremely profitable games.”
It’s a delicious setup. Activision was founded by game developers disgruntled with Atari’s corporate culture. Thirty years later, they’re synonymous with paper-pushing. They recently merged with Blizzard, a company notorious for delaying franchises in the name of quality control. Their alliance is hogtied to a shareholder market and corporate culture that demands immediate returns on their investment. In the name of meeting those quarterly expectations, six bad months can destroy the company.
Their safety net? Acquire “the next big thing”. The problem? When Activision and Blizzard merged, Kotick dumped properties that lacked the now-infamous “potential to be exploited across every platform every year”. The man has created a dangerous situation where they have bet the farm on Call of Duty and Guitar Hero. Find me an empire that went beyond their means and lived to place their eggs in a single basket.
Are we forgetting that in April of 2007, THQ’s stock price peaked above thirty-six dollars? Thirty-one months later, they’re sporting a stock price below five dollars and a catalog of Nickelodeon stowaways. Their lone hope is that a larger company acquires their mountain of trash in order to obtain the Ultimate Fighting Championship license. Place Blizzard’s financial capita aside, and what’s to assume that Activision may not suffer the same calamity?
They’re like locusts. They’re moving from game to game…their whole business. After they’ve consumed every natural resource they move on…and something else is next.
Even Activision’s own history suggests it. In 1999, the Tony Hawk franchise was an affirmation that extreme sports weren’t a fad. If Tony Hawk Ride is as dreadful as reviews paint it, the series is dead. In 2007, Guitar Hero outstold Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 on way to becoming the best-selling core title of the year. Guitar Hero is now the head of a genre whose sales are down sixty percent from 2008 to 2009. And here we are, heralding “teh awesome salze!!” of Modern Warfare 2, the awesomest fuck-awesome to ever balls in your ass. Did you see how the stock market reacted to “the biggest entertainment launch of all-time”?
They didn’t give two shits. Call of Duty is undergoing the Michael Jordan treatment, where the product is so exceptional we’ve become numb to it. And if Activision’s only sure thing is keeping the seas neutral, your company’s long-term future is no guarantee.
Note: I chose not to consider the Blizzard side of things because I cannot find current World of Warcraft subscription data. Should I find it, I’ll supply an update.
November 30th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Maybe they have a trick or two up their sleeve.
Introducing…
HEROIN HERO
but really, I couldn’t imagine that blizzard, creator of such classics as The Lost Vikings and WarCraft: Orcs & Humans, would have a terrible amount of damage dealt to its revenue anytime soon.
But maybe’ i’m wrong.
November 30th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Blizzard is definitely the stable side of the merger, but remember: In a span from 1995 to 2003, they created five of the greatest games of all-time and their accompanying expansions…and it was the casual-friendly MMO that won them the license to print money. I don’t know if Starcraft II and Diablo III will be the revenue juggernauts the company is hoping for…and that could be bad for us.
December 1st, 2009 at 9:06 am
“the awesomest fuck-awesome to ever balls in your ass.”
I don’t think that’s grammatically correct.
December 1st, 2009 at 9:47 am
SC2 and D3 will be more popular than Jesus. If they each don’t outsell MW2 I’ll eat ALL my hats.
To be honest I find what Activision does with annualizing games insulting. Blizzard, while taking forever to release the next installment, proves they’re at least willing to take the time necessary for it to really be “the awesomest fuck-awesome to ever balls in your ass.” Activision pumps out a new CoD game each winter on the same engine of CoD2 with nothing improved but gun skins. The game to my knowledge didn’t even break 1M copies on PC in the UK, with sales at like 6% on the platform. They truly have alienated the community that kept them afloat when they were PC only–I am still of the feeling that UO was the best competitive PC game ever made, even though I haven’t played it in a good 2 or 3 years.
To be honest I’m sorry that I vehemently defended the right for MW2 to keep the CoD moniker during that fiasco, because it really is unlike every other game in the franchise and I’m glad I never bought it.
December 1st, 2009 at 9:49 am
Couldn’t you just bake a hat-shaped cake?
Anyway, Blizzard’s business model seems sustainable, Activision’s not as much. The free market is willing to buy a lot of crud, but even it has its limits.
December 1st, 2009 at 11:21 am
@grmnasasin0227
Considering neither Diablo nor Starcraft sold more than CoD 4, I don’t know how they’ll pull it off.
December 1st, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Sorry, didn’t clarify enough. SC2 and D3 are PC-only games. Thus they should be compared to MW2’s abysmal PC sales. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the console kiddies ruining the game for the rest of us, the series is dead.
December 1st, 2009 at 12:12 pm
@grmnasasin0227
Sales don’t work that way. Also one thing I’ve learned from the internet is that PC elitists are just as bad as console-only players.
December 1st, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Uh, why do sales not work that way? There are easily accessible sales numbers for every game for every platform…it’s that way so publishers can decide what platforms to design for in the first place. Comparing merger’s PC sales across games is a legitimate way to see if what they are doing is effective.
PC elitists as bad as console kiddies? Pourquoi? Because we’re not dumb enough to get money sucked out of us for every DLC, every map-pack, every add-on? Because we actually understand how networking works, and why dedicated servers are infinitely more reliable and faster than listen servers/P2P? Because our machines are infinitely faster and more malleable in their use, whereas they are forced to use the same 5-generations-old tech (literally, in the 360) and thus get sub-par games? I don’t care if PC elitists are stuck-up, I know we are, but the reason is because we know when we’re getting ripped off, unlike the others.
December 1st, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Ghetto: Its very difficult to categorically prove that major entertainment releases actually cause any significant change… So acting like MW2 “doesn’t matter” just because stocks didn’t shift is a straw man. I did a little looking around at major releases of video games and have found no real significant increases in almost all cases.
@grmnasasin0227
PC sales aren’t abysmal for MW2. First week sales for the game have outsold the original game already. Don’t pull some crap about it being only 3% of the UK sales of the game, that is irrelevant, this only shows that consoles are outrageously more popular. It has NOMINALLY outsold all of its predecessors. That is not a failure.
The lack of dedicated servers is a tragedy, but you act like there has been a significant shift in the gameplay that has ruined it.
If Call of Duty 4 and UO are so great, then why don’t you play them more? I don’t play 4 because I’ve played it out, gotten all my golden guns, etc. Even minor changes and revitalization, even at the $60 cost, is worth it because it gets me to return to play a game I love with a different spin.
December 1st, 2009 at 1:00 pm
MW2 only sold more in the first week than CoD4 did in the same timespan, not overall, so that doesn’t mean much.
December 1st, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Why are percentage figures irrelevant? They can also be compared. What was CoD4’s PC sales percent of the pie? ~15%. 6% is terrible compared to what it used to be. Sales are thus abysmal. In countries combined, disregarding the UK as an outlier, the PC sales are still at 9% for MW2.
Erm, the figure was that MW2 outsold CoD4 IN THE SAME TIMESPAN. It’s not like they’re comparing CoD4’s 2+ years on the market to MW2’s first few weeks.
Oh I’m sorry, my bad, wasn’t aware that hiding the console was in fact a step forward for gameplay due to simplicity.
I never said CoD4 was great in my posts. I liked it at the outset, but realized after a time that the series had morphed into a game revolving around tiny imbalanced maps, automatic weapons, and grenades. Any semblance of skill was left behind. A game that rewards people with dropping a live grenade upon failing with kills is simply retarded.
I also don’t play UO anymore because I actually like it to be a warm and fuzzy piece of nostalgia–going back and playing multiplayer again just wouldn’t be the same, even though there are a few rifles places made by some studs I remember.
Besides, I’m having way too much fun playing TF2 with members of EG, Loaded, and others.
December 1st, 2009 at 1:22 pm
@Kirym: The sensationalism of the matter should have been enough to make some movement, or so I would have thought. The game, which will likely account for twenty to twenty-five percent of Activision’s year-end sales, exceeded expectations. Perhaps I’m wrong.
December 1st, 2009 at 2:22 pm
@grmnasasin0227
You can’t just cherry pick your sales data. This is exactly why you’re just as bad as console-only gamers.
“Because we’re not dumb enough to get money sucked out of us for every DLC, every map-pack, every add-on? Because we actually understand how networking works, and why dedicated servers are infinitely more reliable and faster than listen servers/P2P? Because our machines are infinitely faster and more malleable in their use, whereas they are forced to use the same 5-generations-old tech (literally, in the 360) and thus get sub-par games?”
The only part that’s actually valid is the paid DLC. Do you really understand how networking works or do you just know that dedicated servers are better than P2P. I’m guessing the latter, and even if you do know how it works (in detail, not vaguely) the vast majority of PC gamers don’t.
About the tech thing, I wasn’t aware graphics make a better game, but that’s really most PC elitists’ main argument which is just as dumb as console gamers’ “PC GAMING IS DEAD” argument. And don’t kid yourself, buying PC parts online and then assembling your rig doesn’t make you smarter than anyone (well, except people who buy macs).
December 1st, 2009 at 2:41 pm
@Q-Veta: I agree in most of what you said.
I don’t think current 360 are bad because of graphics, just because they’re plain, designed for simple minded players.
I haven’t seen something as great as the gems that PS2 or GC produced. Maybe it’s not too late though.
Also, even though most PC gamers don’t know the complexities of networking, most of them know the meaning of the important concepts (latency,server,P2P) and it’s easy to deduce from those that connecting to a single server with superb broadband is better than using some random’s guy home adsl.
December 1st, 2009 at 2:53 pm
He claimed he knew how networking worked. Reading an article on Wikipedia doesn’t give you in-depth knowledge.
I do agree with you about the fact that this generation isn’t as good as the last one. Although I played a lot of co-op games I still haven’t enjoyed one as much as I did Timesplitters: FP on the PS2. Other than that I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed because it’s something different and couldn’t be done on last gen hardware and also Super Mario Galaxy because it’s fun.
There’s too much brown and bloom in most games these days for my taste.
December 1st, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Easy on the name-calling. You can be as disrespectful as you want to me, but I’d rather it didn’t extend to everyone else. This isn’t the Battle.net forums, this is a place of higher learning!
December 1st, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I’d quote his stats but I don’t know his account name. Also I forgot to mention at least the portables this generation (DS/PSP) have awesome games.
I also don’t have a PS3 but I’m sure the exclusives I can’t play are really good. Especially MGS4.
http://www.sonydefenseforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/mgs4score.gif
This review wouldn’t lie.
December 1st, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Yeah, it would help if I actually played SC over bnet, lulz.
Wait, why can I not compare PC sales data? Calling that cherry picking is ludicrous…if a person wanted to know how well a game sold on PC compared to another game on PC, HOW THE FUCK ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO COMPARE THEM? It’s not cherry-picking, I’m not slanting any data…I’m simply comparing PC sales of 2 games.
Yes, I know very much how dedicated servers work…I’ve been an admin for several clans, and have played on my share of P2P. P2P is fine for shit like D2 where you’re interacting on a 2D interface with not much going on. A shooter requires all kinds of data crunching that has to get done by the host’s machine…data from the players is sent to the host, sorted out, then sent back to each player. If you’ve got any knowledge on the current capabilities of hardware, P2P cannot be done effectively for shooters. IW tried to alleviate this by making massive hitboxes.
Why are you assuming I’m talking about graphics? Do you know any of the actual hardware that goes into the current consoles? People who make that argument like “oh well you only give a damn about graphics” are seriously misinformed…without the innovation of the hardware market of the PC to lead the way, you wouldn’t be GETTING Crysis on consoles for the next iteration, not to mention there would be no Crysis to begin with. I definitely do not agree with graphics being the most important part of games, I love me some old RPGs…but apparently because I’m a PC gamer and talk about superior performance I do.
Assembling a PC from parts does not make you any smarter than anyone else, I totally agree. OC’ing the shit out of it for even more performance does.
December 1st, 2009 at 3:33 pm
You’re saying you don’t need better graphics then you mention Crysis as some grand innovation.
You don’t need super powerful hardware to innovate, just goes to show how stupid you are.
Also about the sales, you’re not considering that MW2 was pretty much only advertised for consoles (specifically the 360).
December 1st, 2009 at 3:38 pm
How exactly does overclocking make you smarter than everyone?
I too can go on an overclocking forum and read some threads and ask for help if I don’t understand something.
It’s not like you’re doing something like this: http://www.bash.org/?832291
December 1st, 2009 at 4:05 pm
@grmnasasin0227
Percentages can be compared. But in this case it doesn’t matter, because it is nominally larger. If you have 6% of a very large number it can be larger than 15% of a smaller number. These are the early sales figures, yes, but its all we have, and right now, it is bigger.
More sales = more sales.
Its like this. For example, before President Obama (I forgo his election because it is a voter turnout phenomenon), George W. Bush was elected with the largest number of votes in U.S. history. Does this mean that George W. Bush also got the largest percentage win of any president? No. His larger number of votes can be attributed to a larger population, not because he was insanely popular. (Comparing the total number of voters between the 2000 and 2004 elections, the total number of voters closely approximates with our annual growth rate of .95%)
Overclocking doesn’t make you a connoisseur of games, nor does it imply skill, it just makes you knowledgeable on hardware, something that is irrelevant to this entire discussion.
You did contradict your own argument with Crysis – it is a pure example of how games can go wrong; it looks great! But how good is the actual gameplay? Consoles aren’t missing out on much.
The problem with P2P is not the fact that there “isn’t much going on” in those other games (packets are universal in size, sent at regular intervals, optimized), its that ping is important in FPS because of the extremely fast paced “twitch” nature. In the heat of battle, a fraction of a second matters immensely. In something like an RTS or RPG, pings for the most part are hardly noticeable above until nearly 300.
On to the actual topic: Activision WILL continue to exploit the franchise. That doesn’t mean I can’t have a blast with MW2 now.
December 1st, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Quit the pissing contest already.
Ghetto, if you’re interested in investors’ confidence in A-B, wait for an earnings report or annual report. Remember that most investors will approach the company the same way Kotick does. Remember also that WoW is doubly valuable, because it generates not only revenue but cash; this gives A-B the ability to borrow money to pay for things like a $200 million advertising campaign for an unreleased game.
December 1st, 2009 at 5:27 pm
If you think Crysis is ANYTHING other than innovation, you’re simply wrong. Crytek are amazing at what they do.
Uh, yes, you do need superior hardware to realistically innovate. Take ray tracing, it’s the new big thing…Caustic is doing a great job. Try doing that with older gear. It simply won’t happen in a timely way to get out a product or standard. There is no significant gain in graphics processing that was designed by or for shitty gear, period.
If they had actually bothered to advertise for the PC, it would have been even more insulting considering it’s a direct port. But no, apparently MW2’s sales are great…Activision apparently doesn’t need to advertise to PC gamers to make a sale. It IS ranked 3rd on XFire for minutes played weekly. They did make sales. The people who knew what CoD4 was bought it, and that’s all they care about.
OC’ing makes one smarter than everyone else because they use a minimal power cost (~$30 increase per machine per month depending on KWh rates) to drastically increase the performance of their machine. It allows you to spend much less money, but get much more for it. No, I don’t use glycerin, but that’s hardly a 24/7 accomplishment…which is all an end user would care about. But sure, benching. I’m building my own bench and am in the process of tracking down pots for DICE and LN2…what more do you want?
Protip boss, when MW2 gets less play than CoD4 per week, it says something about how gamers feel about it. The 2+ year old game wins.
I didn’t claim to be a connoisseur of games, but thanks for the title. I’ve played enough to recognize trends, know what’s superior to another, etc. OC’ing does indeed imply skill, I know my way around a BIOS better than you do…I OC’ed your damn rig for you. Hardware is completely necessary to the interaction of games with a person…it’s the vessel that brings the two together. Did I claim Crysis was a good game? No. I said it was an innovation. Who knows, some people like it.
Uh yes, but in an FPS there are more packets…so there really IS less that’s going on in other stuff. Like when you pull down settings to increase your fps, you’re demanding more packets from the host. fps in RTS or the like is usually restricted by the game to be either 30 or 60 to reduce latency with the host.
December 1st, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Crysis and Crysis:Warhead are the best SP fps in this generation and probably in general until now.
December 1st, 2009 at 6:20 pm
most comments i’ve ever seen for a blog post on this site.
December 1st, 2009 at 6:55 pm
MW2 is beating by far all other steam games… http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
And its not that far away from beating MW1 on xfire
Yes, your OCing argument makes you intelligent about hardware and how they interact with games, but it doesn’t give you anything on actually knowing what is best. However I will give you that you play alot of games, and that counts for something.
Packet amounts are about the same in most games, FPS or not. The amount of data being passed around is significant; as I said, it matters on response time more in FPS, thats why its more noticeable.
You only experience lag with insanely (300+) high FPS, and to actually have it high enough to cause any latency issues is something that is rather difficult to accomplish in modern games. Its extremely rare happenstance.
December 1st, 2009 at 7:15 pm
@Kirym:
Gratz to MW2 for beating a 5 year old game by 14% and a 10 year old game by 37%, considering that both those games fight a lot for the user base, and both summed beat MW2 by 60%.
We all know that MW2 will lose most of its player base in few years, and both CS and CSS will beat it in players in few months.
December 1st, 2009 at 9:01 pm
@grmnasasin0227
I wasn’t talking about innovation more along the lines of gameplay. Look at Portal or Shadow of the Colossus.
Seems you mistook that for better graphics because you don’t know any better.
Now that I looked back on a previous post of yours, I saw this: “Why are you assuming I’m talking about graphics?” and lold.
December 1st, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Sure, but Portal also had innovation in the graphics department. It was the first to have true reflections, and the physics were pretty damn good (which can be calculated on the GPU depending on your settings).
I still to this day play BG2. Do you think I give a DAMN about graphics in games? What the fuck am I supposed to so to get you to think I do? I don’t care what you think, my library definitely says otherwise. My point about graphics being important in games is that the hardware comes first, then software (engines, standards, etc.) are written for it. With no new hardware there is no innovation for these things, and PCs (and thus, CONSOLES) fall on the wayside for development.
Besides, srsly dude name a game that was good this year that didn’t also look good.
December 1st, 2009 at 10:03 pm
You only mention graphics and then ask why do I think you give a damn about graphics?
“If you think Crysis is ANYTHING other than innovation, you’re simply wrong.
Uh, yes, you do need superior hardware to realistically innovate. Take ray tracing, it’s the new big thing… ”
Ok, please mention something about Crysis that has nothing to do with how great it looks.
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:11 am
It’s a shooter on the Far Cry-esque tropical island that improves upon the physics engine and has more realistic AI. It was coded to have enough settings to be run by a very diverse mix of machines, which is a very remarkable achievement. Warhead is better optimized than vanilla. Need more fun facts that have nothing to do with graphics?
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:24 am
I see, so it’s basically a FPS just like a lot of other before it that looks better and has a better physics engine.
Never before seen innovation right there.
December 2nd, 2009 at 2:19 am
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:44 am
nice job on creating a discussion
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:03 am
You probably shouldn’t argue with Veta about games, he called Red Faction 3 Game of the Year.
December 2nd, 2009 at 7:19 am
Really, what other games came before june that were so good? I had fun with it and you’re blowing it way out of proportion.
TBH now Assassin’s Creed 2 is my GOTY.
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:23 am
“Why are you assuming I’m talking about graphics?”
“Uh, yes, you do need superior hardware to realistically innovate. Take ray tracing, it’s the new big thing…”
I think I may have gotten irony poisoning from that…
“Sure, but Portal also had innovation in the graphics department. It was the first to have true reflections, and the physics were pretty damn good (which can be calculated on the GPU depending on your settings).”
Umm, define what you mean by “true reflections”.
Also, Portal had incredibly simple level design. I’m not counting that against it, in fact I love it, but it hardly takes a miraculous hardware innovation to get it to run smoothly.
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:46 am
“A lot of others before it?” Far Cry was the ONLY game like that before Crysis, and made by…wait for it…Crytek. If you are bitching about Crysis being unoriginal due to similar locale (and it’s made by the same people), then you must repeal all love for the CoD series in your next post.
For the record, when I was talking about console hardware I was also bringing CPU architecture into the conversation, but apparently nobody picked up on that and I got quoted on it a few times…
http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/506/portalInPortal_valve_error.jpg
That’s what I mean. That would make previous coders cry. Valve did an excellent job. In case you weren’t aware, Valve games are the only real games on the market that are CPU bound, not GPU bound…it barely matters what card you’ve got, but more based on your core architecture, cache, etc. You can gain more than 20fps by OC’ing just a few hundred MHz.
And for the record, making things CPU bound is actually extremely difficult. GPUs technically have hundreds of cores, whereas the best CPU on the market has a theoretical 12. The GPU can crunch numbers so much more efficiently than a CPU. Thus Valve’s decision to make it harder on themselves so that more people could play their games with a wide variety of CPUs is commendable.
December 2nd, 2009 at 11:16 am
Actually though I cant confirm when exactly such “technology” was created, the Portal team was not the first. Prey (which came out a year earlier than portal, and is largely forgotten. It also had variable plane gravity) was able to do exactly the same thing, however since you cant actually spawn portals, an “infinite loop” only happens in a very few number of instances. So as far as technology goes, its hardly revolutionary. Also importantly, in neither cases are they actually infinite, they just appear to be infinite, and even then you actually have to override game settings to get it to go as far as that screen shot.
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I enjoyed the campaigns of CoD 4 and MW2, that’s about it. The only multiplayer FPS games I truly enjoyed were Quake, UT and UT2004. I played Tribes for a week and enjoyed that too.
But let’s take Shadow of the Colossus. It was released in 2005 on hardware that was 5 years old and there’s still no game like it. Or Resident Evil 4 last gen was incredible. What innovation has Resident Evil 5 brought us on vastly superior hardware? Coop, oh boy what innovation, truly the hardware is the only thing that matters.
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:56 pm
People didn’t become numb to Michael Jordan
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Why would I defend a game I don’t like? :P
Now, anything with a Bioware icon on the box is gold though…BG series, Kotor series, Mass Effect trilogy…goddamn all amazing stuff. Bethesda’s my 2nd place for TES. Don’t get my wrong, IW/Treyarch have put out good stuff; I’ve played through vanilla and UO way too many times to count, and UO has more hours logged by me than any other game online. I just really can’t stomach what IW did to this game though, they’re not getting money from me till they get their act together.