Don’t Try To Frighten Us With Your Sorcerous Ways, Lord Kotick.
In case you haven’t heard, the heads of Infinity Ward, makers of recent smash hit Modern Warfare 2, were fired by publisher Activision on March 1st. Clearly there are conflicting stories available. Activision claims that West and Zampella (the aforementioned heads of Infinity Ward) have been courting other publishers and generally performed insubordination. The two in return filed a lawsuit, claiming that they have been wrongfully terminated and are being cheated out of royalties they are owed. The most interesting part of the lawsuit – for me at least – is that the whole thing apparently broke down because Activision wanted to push Infinity Ward towards cranking out Modern Warfare 3 as fast as possible, while the studio would rather have worked on a new innovative intellectual property instead. I don’t know how much of those claims is true, but this last part at least I believe. The Bobby Koticks of this world simply don’t know or care about gaming. They care about profits and think that they are acting in the best interest of the shareholders. But are they?
Scott “Lum The Mad” Jennings posted a beautiful rant on the topic of publishers on last Wednesday. “Publishers are evil and cannot be trusted.” he says, and I’m inclined to believe him. Of course they are evil, in the sense that they only care for their own profit margins and have no real interest in making good games. Those people aren’t gamers, they even publicly admit to wanting to take the fun out of making video games. And you know what, that’s normal and to be expected. Video games have long left the niche of small development studios that simply make games because they love games. When there’s enough money to be made in an industry, the big sharks will come. We all know what sharks do and we really shouldn’t be surprised when they try to eat us after we let them into our waters.
“Getting mad at Activision for this kind of thing is like getting mad at an ape for throwing feces. It’s just how the beast communicates.” – Tim Schafer
What really gets me is how stupid these publishers can be in their dealings. Every child could have seen that cranking out a bazillion Guitar Hero games with identical features and simply different music is not the way to continually rake in cash. Some sources actually claim that Activision lost money in 2009 – yes, that is the company that published both World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare 2. These losses are, in part, attributed to the drop in sales of the Guitar Hero games. Do you know why you couldn’t see that coming Bobby? Because you have no idea about gaming.
Darth Kotick. (Please excuse the terrible shop. Seems I can't find a good one to steal.)
All these business people getting their fingers into the gaming market are getting burned over and over again, while the real gamers understand the market. Compare Valve’s phenomenal success with steam to the failings of Darth Kotick and you’ll see what I mean. Or look at analyst Michael Pachter of US security giant Wedbush Morgan who claimed that Borderlands was being “sent out to die” when it actually raked in great sales. I won’t even get into the terrible DRM move from Ubisoft again.
If I had money to invest, I surely wouldn’t put it in the hands of Activision or Ubisoft. Not because they are evil, most big corporations are, but because they simply don’t understand what they are doing. Not having that kind of money, I wouldn’t care as much about what those publishers do, if they wouldn’t kill gaming with their idiocy. Pushing out mindless sequel after mindless sequel not only doesn’t make you money in the long run, but also takes away the chance for interesting innovation. Activision has been the final nail in the coffin for WoW, and now they are looking to suck Modern Warfare dry as well. I don’t care about the Modern Warfare / Call of Duty franchise at all, but I’m afraid for the future of gaming if this continues. I can only hope that investors get burned enough that they stop giving Darth Kotick more money to burn. Yes, that will reduce the amount of development money available to the gaming industry, but maybe it will allow new ideas to flourish and maybe, just maybe, investors will at some point see the light of day and invest into companies run by people who understand gaming. People who understand the value of building a playerbase that trusts them and that is able to think in the long term. A man can hope, right?
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