This was a talk at the Deutsche Bank Security Technologies Conference. Not at E3. So the part where he spends a lot of time talking about profits and operating margins
make perfect sense. He's actually just being an economist. Raising the prices on Modern Warfare 2, for example, would make a higher profit in his mind, because people would still buy the same amount of them. It's not actually being evil. He's not trying to bring you down. Getting a hot title on release is already a luxury, whether the kids with the expendable incomes want to believe it is or not. So his entire discussion about pricing and profitability is something I have no issue with.
Maybe the choice quotes of the event, though, came when Kotick talked about Activision’s developers; you know, the guys who actually make the stuff he gets so rich from. You’d think he’d have a bit of respect for them, right? Oh no, Kotick’s goal over the past 10 years has been – you couldn’t make this up – “to take all the fun out of making video games.” How? By instilling a culture of “scepticism, pessimism, and fear” amongst the company’s staff based around the economic depression and an incentive program that rewards “profit and nothing else”.
This does seem like poor management, if I'm reading it properly, but I'd like to see the direct quote, if anybody has it, just to make sure. Kotick should know that in times of economic depression, entertainment industries flourish (though, this has been tested on film and theatre, and not video games, seeing as how the last major economic depression we had took place when video games were still quite fledgling. Then again, Mario came out during that time).
This is a huge problem in the film industry, music industry and TV industry. Art and entertainment should not be beholden to profit, or in the thrall of buisnessmen.
The really sad thing is that stuff like this creates a huge sense of dissatisfaction within the audience, in this case gamers. Noone wants to be told they're being treated as a walking wallet, or that their entertainment is entirely designed around getting their money, instead of entertaining them.
Entertainment and art should be an interaction between the artist/entertainer, and the audience. Both benefit from the relationship. When you throw a buisnessman into the mix he'll get between the two, mediating how they interact. "Make games shorter, pay more for this, you need more peripherals, this game sold well so make it like that, etc" and eventually only he's benefitting in any real way. Again, look at the music and film industries to see how this plays out.
I emboldened the most correct part of your post! I'm a Drama major, and so I like to imagine I know at least a little bit about this subject. Here's the major issue, though.
Money is important to the entertainment industry. Nobody is giving massive grants that uphold any of these industries (theatre probably gets the largest, here in Canada, but Stratford is only given somewhere around 3-7% (based on what I heard Antoni Cimolino, the General Director, say during a lecture once), which is hardly the steel girders holding it afloat).
Instead, industries have to provide people with things they want to pay money to experience. It's all well and good if you have produced something amazing and fantastic that changes the way people look at the world, but if you don't exceed the gross cost of producing it, you're going to starve.
If people didn't want to play these games, the businessman would try to direct it somewhere else. But marketability is important to all entertainment industries. I paid $100 to go see Christopher Plummer perform in the Tempest, even though I consider the Tempest to be Shakespeare's worst play. Christopher Plummer was likely the best thing about that play, but I felt it was kind of lacking in all other respects. Yet, if another amazing actor with sixty years of experience showed up at Stratford to perform in an equally subpar play, I would still pay $100 for it.
With video games, you have to stop and consider the great, revolutionary games we claim to have been playing, and put them beside the games we consider to be mainstream garbage (though I don't agree that there
is a mainstream garbage. Economists aren't making these games
bad, even if they do sometimes force a rush job or push for a different direction). Modern Warfare 2 costs something like $60.00, doesn't it? The entire Civilization 4 Package costs about $40.00. Warcraft 3's Battlechest costs around $40.00. With tax, Mount and Blade cost me $40.00. Braid cost me about $10 or $20, and people still claimed it was overpriced.
Would you have paid $60.00 for Braid? You can't argue that it had a very small development team, because the fellow who developed it put in $200,000 into its production,
and the game is about as complete as it could ever be. The mechanics are done, there are plenty of levels, the graphics are smooth and just how the designer wanted them to look. This game is done, finished, locked in. But nobody is going to pay $60.00 for it. Love and care and joy went into it, but I will get about twelve hours of enjoyment out of it, overall, whereas the other four examples I gave would give me far more, especially when their multiplayer capacities were thrown into the mix.
Art and Entertainment Industries
are businesses. If they're not making money, they'll stop making games. Bobby Kotick isn't killing the industry. If anything, he might actually be expanding it. Business Majors are taught to expand and invest, to make even more money. There are a lot of Computer Science majors who are going to need to find jobs within 1-4 years. Too many, in fact. If Kotick's strategy creates enough capital to open up three more studios and employ three hundred more of these guys, I'll be okay with that. We'll always have our arthouse games
and our blockbuster games.
Incidentally, this was published in September, 2009.
Like, holy shit, old news or what.
And the game industry has learned the exact same thing as the movie industry. Put enough money into it, make enough money back. Except that video games have a far longer shelf life for their content, and I think their money ultimately goes farther.
The film industry is notorious for being full of bad investments. Putting a lot of money into a film doesn't always work. In fact, it's often better to put less money into it, unless you are absolutely sure it will bring an audience. Inception couldn't have had a $150 million budget if Christopher Nolan had never directed Dark Knight.
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Topic: I hate Bobby Kotick and he is killing the industry. (Read 16244 times)