Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Seems like the Activision bossman thinks that Electronic Arts aren’t going to be printing spacebucks with their forthcoming Star Wars MMO, and said as much to his investors. As reported over here by Reuters, Kotick poured scepticism onto the up and coming MMO, saying: “Lucas is going to be the principal beneficiary of the success of Star Wars. We’ve been in business with Lucas for a long time and the economics will always accrue to the benefit of Lucas, so I don’t really understand how the economics work for Electronic Arts.” He went on to say “”If you look at the history of the people investing in an MMO and achieving success, it’s a small number.” And his company are, of course, one of that number, and must be a little nervous about possibly losing subscribers to the enormous Star Wars project. EA, meanwhile, claim that SWTOR will be a success if it hits just 500k subscribers, a figure that looks to be well within their reach.

Activision boss Big Bobby K is unsurprisingly out on the campaign trail for Modern Warfare 3, and that means any journalists who manage to get past his Nazgûl guards inevitably attempt to ask him how he thinks EA’s rivalrous Battlefield 3 is going to compare.

Here’s what he said. It almost certainly won’t make you say incredibly rude things about a man you’ve never met.
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So Double Fine’s Tim Schafer said Activision’s Bobby Kotick was a prick and then Bobby Kotick said Tim Schafer was rubbish and he’d never even met him anyway and then Tim Schafer said Bobby Kotick was stupid and mean, and before that Bobby Kotick said EA were rubbish and mean and then EA’s Jeff Brown said Bobby Kotick was rubbish and mean and now I don’t know what to think about anything and everyone seems mean and angry and I’m so confused about who’s a goodie and who’s a baddie and I wish people would just make nice games instead of calling each other names across the internet.

For God’s sakes! How does this help anything? And we wonder why the games industry doesn’t get taken seriously by the mainstream media.

(Pic source)

Piped transmissions from Alec link me to this story on GI.biz, in which ActiBlizz ultraboss Bobby Kotick, talking to the FT, says he wants to support the PC, primarily because it is an open platform. This comes as part of getting grumpy with Xbox Live taking money for people basically just playing Call Of Duty. “Mr Kotick sees an opportunity to break the consoles’ “walled gardens with new gamer-friendly PCs, designed to be plugged into the television,” says the FT report. “Activision will “very aggressively” support efforts by Dell and HP to connect PCs to TVs.”

Of course, ActiBlizz is mostly supported by World Of Warcraft anyway, which has got to create a nagging sensation for anyone who is firmly locked into console land.

Gamasutra picked up the story that Activision’s Bobby Kotick has confirmed that 70% of his company’s operating profit comes from “non-console based” games. And you know what that means. As if there was any doubt, we can now be sure that of the impact World Of Warcraft is having on filling Activision’s coffers with precious gold. It doesn’t matter how many plastic guitars Acti sells to the console owners, the biggest game publisher in the world is still being bankrolled by a PC game featuring malignant fishmen. Kotick is also hinting at a “subscription-based” version of the Call Of Duty franchise. So that should be interesting.