Activision is one of the biggest forces in the industry when it comes to retail releases, but they've been conspicuously absent from the social gaming space. However, in an interview with Industry Gamers, CEO Bobby Kotick says the company is working on these games, but some of Kotick's comments make me think Activision isn't likely to give us anything interesting in the space.
Rather than trying to start from a good game design, it sounds like Activision is going after analytics people to make these games. Don't get me wrong; analytics are definitely important, but they don't make good games. I can't say I'm surprised. I expect nothing more than 'Ville copies from the company who practically single-handedly killed the music game genre, plans to milk the Call of Duty franchise into oblivion, and bullies and fires some of its best creators.
Not to mention the fact that Activision is sooooo far behind everyone else in this space. I think the only way they could become a viable player is to buy a company that's already successful, and I predict that very thing will happen within the next year. However, being late to the game has slimmed the pickings considerably. Zynga is going public, Playfish and PopCap are already owned by EA, and Disney owns Playdom. If Activision hopes to catch the audience those companies do, then they're going to have to go for smaller companies like CrowdStar or RockYou.
3 comments:
I can only hope Activision doesn't ruin the social/mobile games space. Zynga does a great job at that already.
Great post Nicole! As I'm fond of saying, you can't A/B test fun.
I thought there was already a guitar hero(made by activision) in facebook?
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