[Ed. Note: There has been a lot of discussion about this topic recently. Eric weighed in on the matter some time ago but we are just getting around to posting it.

Recently GameSpot posted a story quoting Bobby Kotick's ideas for running Activision. One of his goals was "to take all the fun out of making video games." It is his intention to install into company culture "skepticism, pessimism, and fear."

And then if you remember, he's also joked—-no one knows how jokingly—-that games should be more expensive than they are. Maybe $90! And of course who can forget Activision dumping Ghostbusters and Brutal Legend because they can't—-in the words of Kotick himself—-exploit those franchises every year on every platform.

And this brings us to one of the biggest conundrums gamers deal with. We, as a community, argued with Roger Ebert about whether games are art. We argued passionately, sometimes intelligently (other times not), for our favorite medium and pastime. We cited games like Rez, Beyond Good and Evil, Katamari Damacy and the like as shining examples of interactive games as art.

Like movies, though, the games we spend the most time talking about are those big name titles like Guitar Hero and Modern Warfare—-games from major publishers like Activision. Often the games that populate places like the IGF are passed over without much attention because they're indie games, because they're not the games everyone is clamoring for.

So we talk about games as art, but ones that sell are the ones made for strictly business reasons. As ill as it makes me to read the things Kotick says, I have to admit that whatever he's doing is working, at least for now.

Some companies, like the EA of recent years, try to balance things out: Cash cows like Madden and Tiger Woods bring in massive money while projects like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge don't do quite as well financially but give the company credibility. The EA Partners program helps them establish a positive working relationship with other developers that didn't involve buying them out, as well. I get the feeling that EA was realizing that their yearly iterations and lackluster movie licenses weren't adding up to a good long term business plan and made some changes to endear themselves to their customers while still keeping a cashflow. Activision is taking an opposite approach: more cash at all costs. Kotick even added that the company's plan "really rewards profit and nothing else."





It's a difficult question. Activision is making the games that everyone seems to want. Even with music game sales declining, Guitar Hero is still wildly popular and will stay that way for some time. Activision's intent to disconnect the game from consoles only strengthens that. And of course we mustn't forget that also under Activision's umbrella is the near-perfect Blizzard with their monstrous World of Warcraft and the mob-inducing Starcraft and Diablo sequels on the way. However, I can't help but think of a scenario like NBC's when all of their "must-see TV" shows ended within a couple years of each other, leaving the channel firmly at the bottom of the network TV chain. If the popularity of Activision's primary franchises drops off quickly enough they could find themselves in a similar situation, however unlikely that may be.

As a gamer, I will say that I like EA's model a bit better as it is right now. A few years ago they were doing the same sort of thing as Activision and I was playing very few of their games. Then slow, but surely, they began releasing more interesting, and higher quality titles, and I find more games than ever with the EA logo on my shelves. Activision games, on the other hand, I always find myself thinking about twice before buying. Is Guitar Hero 20XX really that much of an upgrade over the previous iteration? And with Kotick's statement about exploiting franchises every year, the word iteration is more appropriate than ever. It's not like I don't play Activision games, either; in fact, I spent a few weeks this summer contemplating the boomerang physics of my Xbox controller while trying to play Prototype, and picked up Guitar Hero World Tour last year almost exclusively for the NOFX song.

I have a feeling that as long as Kotick is at the helm, things aren't likely to change; and with the steady popularity of their flagship franchises, I don't think too many people are going to complain outside of communities like ours. All I can hope is that the big man at the top doesn't suck all the fun out of Activision's end products as he is trying to do out of their creation.