I've always been fascinated by the gamer community's tendency (need?) to personify games companies, its quickness to vilify what it sees as the "bad" guy (those who prioritize profits, natch), and its preoccupation with the personas of various individuals in our field (even journos)!
Of course, it's understandable -- in an entertainment technology biz, the focus is on the products and rarely on the folks behind them. I'm always interested in those folks, and anyone who enjoys team sports knows what happens when a passionate, focused audience plays favorites. It's impassioned, polarizing and just plain fun.
As his public profile has increased at a rate congruent to Activision's coffers, the publisher's chairman, Bobby Kotick, has fast taken his spot dead center of the gamer community's crosshairs. The frequency with which he throws around words like "exploit," "pessimism" and "raise prices" don't earn him any fans, nor do his aggressive biz tactics. So has he earned all the hatred, or is the man just doing his job for his investors -- and a great one at that?
I took a look at the issue for my column this month in Kotaku, hitting up industry insiders, analysts and his own employees to analyze the anti-ATVI sentiment from all sides. Give it a read! And if you dig it, kindly Digg it?
Bonus material: Another excellent parody song from our friends at IdleThumbs, "inspired by the teachings of Kotick." Brought to you by the mind of Chris Remo, who you might recall also brightened our lives with the "Senior Super Douche"-inspired "Stop Doing Interviews," also Activision-oriented.
PS: Big ups to Twitter follower Vahn16 for the Kurtz comparison -- "Love @leighalexander's Kotick article, but is anyone else having flashbacks to Heart of Darkness? 'He's a great man!' but few have met him."
PPS: Also big ups to The_Game_Boy for making reference to division-winning Yankees and their ol' figurehead -- "@leighalexander @pkollar It isn't a bad thing that gaming now has its George Steinbrenner."
(Follow me on Twitter so I can quote you one day, too!)
10 comments:
While on the one hand, it's hard to fault the guy for making decisions that will make him, and his shareholders rich, by cranking out "exploitable" games, the fact is that of all the publishers out there, Activision is more than capable of weathering the inherent risks of making new and different games.
Back in 2005, Activision would have passed on the original Guitar Hero. They only wanted it after a smaller company, who stood to lose a lot, took the risk to prove it to be a viable game. A lot of people probably resent Activision's current strategy of simply buying up other companies' games once all of the initial risk has been removed.
Hey, for that poll on the right, what does WOW mean?
Haha, only kidding.
Even putting everything else aside, there's one thing that I cannot find it in my heart to forgive Activision for. Maybe it's fair, maybe not. But it annoys me enough that I'll go on hating Activision for it even if it is unfair: not letting multiple people on the same console play call of duty online together. Halo did it, and it is quite literally the only reason I even play halo anymore. Activision has to know that it pisses people off, but in two sequels now they haven't included it (at least, as far as I know modern warfare 2 won't have it). The only reasoning for this that makes any sense is to try to make more people buy the game to play online. Jerks. It can't possibly impact their sales in any significant way.
Ah, gamers.
Almost everything they do seems to be more evidence that they should get out more and stop obsessing over the tiniest detail.
With such a rabid, obsessive fanbase, its no surprise that anyone who sticks their head above water for even a second will have it torn off - or inflated with praise.
One thing I've always admired about games is that there's no way they can be seen as a singular person's work. A finished CD requires the work of legions of session musicians, producers, mixers, sound engineers - none of whom will receive a moment's credit (unless they're Timbaland). Movies are even worse for it - people focus on Directors or Stars (or, if you're a bit arty, Screenwriters) at the behest of people like the Director of Photography, who wield the power to completely change the tone of the work.
I really hope this isn't a sign that, as games get bigger, they're going to become less commonly seen as collaborative works.
I keep re-writing this comment, trying to find a succinct, balanced way to state my opinion... but I can't. So I'm just going to go for hyperbole instead.
The thing that pisses me off about Kotick is that he ISNT a success. I don't think he deserves to be credited as a good business man and he's clearly a business man at the expense of all other traits (as outlined in this Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0202/052.html) which makes him even more pathetic.
What Kotick did was keep Activision running long enough to get bought by Vivendi. He spent almost 20 years running creative ideas into the ground and then he sold out at just the right time, for which he is celebrated. Certainly he's cunning, he was able to crawl his way into the right positions to survive all these years. But I don't want to ever hear him called a success or certainly not a "hero". He's neither of those except along the most cynical lines.
It makes me sad when I read the Forbes article I linked to above and think about little baby Bobby and his capitalist dreams... I don't want to see Kotick held up as any kind of role model. Infact I think he's running his life (as a pursuit of larger piles of cash) entirely incorrectly. Also I just don't see the point of it all. Fair enough he doesn't like games and he wants to run his business like a factory in order to make more money. But surely there are EASIER ways to make cash than by making compromised, shitty games. Why not try the porn industry? It just seems like a lot of effort to make money through the games industry, which is fickle along a dozen different lines.
So... all of this is why I don't like him. His smart ass attitude towards "creatives" and smug self-satisfaction only compound my feelings but ultimately it has little to do with games specifically and more to do with my own general philosophies on how a human should conduct themselves.
Cool article though :)
With me, it's a personal dislike for corporate thinking that has me disliking Koticks practices. Don't have a problem with the dude himself, cause I don't KNOW the dude himself.
Also, thank you for the link :p
The reason why I as a gamer should be interested in business leaders is more subtle. I think there is a reason and it springs out of the 'funding future games development' argument against piracy. So they say you should buy game X because the company who made it needs that money to fund the making of game Y and you want game Y made. However that only works if you trust the guy ultimately in charge of deciding what game Y is going to be like not to decide to make a crap game. With many companies we have justification for that trust. I think I know enough about Gabe Newell to be justified in believing that good decisions will be made regarding the next Valve game and so I should buy Valves current games to ensure that happens. If Gabe Newell decided to leave and Bobby Kotick took charge of Valve then I'd lose a large chunk of that justification. That's because I know Bobby Kotick doesn't actually care about the quality of games except as a means to an end and to trust that his goal of making money will fall in line with my goal of funding the development of good games is to trust in the taste of the mass market and that's just crazy!
All this means is that if I spend my limited amount of money with half an eye on promoting the creation of good videogames then all things being equal I should buy games from almost any publisher but Activision because Activision are the publisher who are most explicitly not interested in making good games for good games sake. It doesn't mean Bobby Kotick is evil, he might well be a very nice man, but it does mean that I have reason not to trust him to choose how to spend my money since his goals simply aren't in line with my own.
The reason why we as gamers should be interested in games journalists is different. The reason is that we have to trust journalists to impart information to us. If we can learn more about individual journalists then that trust relationship can start to become more justified. This is of course particularly important for consumers like myself reading game reviews. So for instance because I'm a big RPS fan I know enough about their associate Quinns that when he posts saying that "The Void is the most important game you are GOING TO FUCKING PLAY." that one sentence has enough information for me to know I should buy that game. If I read a similar comment from some random person then I'd really need to know quite a lot more before I could justify that conclusion. On the flip side of the coin I take the opinions of Ellie Gibson of Eurogamer with a pinch of salt because I know she liked 'Star Wars: The Phantom Menace' so I know her tastes sometimes differ wildly from my own.
Don't hate the playa, hate his games.
Can't you hate the playa, and play his games like the weak souls that we are? That's getting into the whole Shadow Complex debate thing, even if it's hardly a fair comparison.
But I enjoyed the piece, so thanks Leigh :)
Kotick is a capitalist warlord, and if he felt he could make more money by making shitty games over good ones, he would. Does that make him detestable? Maybe. As I see it, though, he's just doing his job, i.e. making money.
I also don't think it's just a thing relative to this particular industry; it's a philosophical dispute of values – that we live in societies driven by bottom lines rather than artistry.
It's an interesting article you wrote, but it strikes me as a little unnecessary, like your journalistic training got the best of you. I don't need an in-depth look at Bobby Kotick to know who he is. You read what the man says and you know who he is. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If Bobby Kotick talks like Gordon Gekko and acts like Gordon Gekko, then guess what?
There was a wierd undercurrent in your article though, it seemed to follow the logic that Forbes must use - the man is raking in the cash, so therefore what he's doing must be right. As someone who thinks of games as a creative endeavor, it's a sentiment that makes me profoundly uncomfortable, and it makes me more uncomfortable because in the back of my mind, I know that that's the important metric to the people with the most power in the industry.
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