Activision - It's a fallacy to say we're not innovating
A portion of a Gamasutra interview with Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg...
GS: There was a DICE panel that explored today's publishing model, and one argument was that it is inherently broken, and that big publishers are hindering innovation and choice for consumers [Activision was named specifically in this panel]. When you look at the publishing model right now, are there certain things that you see that need to be fixed? What would you focus on improving?
EH: I didn't see the panel, but there are two things. One, we were one of the few publishers that launched a new intellectual property [Skylanders] this year, and not only launched it well, but in the top 10 games of the year. And we launched a fairly ambitious and entrepreneurial digital service for our Call of Duty community that took two years to develop, that there was no proven model for.
It's simply a fallacy to say that we're not innovating, or that we're not attempting to bring new IP and new ideas to the industry. What we are doing is making those choices very carefully, and focusing on areas where we think we have something unique to contribute, and a real competitive advantage.
The other thing that I think that point of view doesn't take into account is gamers' behavior. Gamers are voluntarily spending more and more time with the games that they love, and that by nature drives you to innovate within those franchises, as opposed to maybe the behavior we saw a few years ago, where people grazed more, and sampled things from many different categories, and moved on. Now you have really long-standing relationships between gamers and the games that they love, and to an extent, we're responding to that behavior.
GS: There was a DICE panel that explored today's publishing model, and one argument was that it is inherently broken, and that big publishers are hindering innovation and choice for consumers [Activision was named specifically in this panel]. When you look at the publishing model right now, are there certain things that you see that need to be fixed? What would you focus on improving?
EH: I didn't see the panel, but there are two things. One, we were one of the few publishers that launched a new intellectual property [Skylanders] this year, and not only launched it well, but in the top 10 games of the year. And we launched a fairly ambitious and entrepreneurial digital service for our Call of Duty community that took two years to develop, that there was no proven model for.
It's simply a fallacy to say that we're not innovating, or that we're not attempting to bring new IP and new ideas to the industry. What we are doing is making those choices very carefully, and focusing on areas where we think we have something unique to contribute, and a real competitive advantage.
The other thing that I think that point of view doesn't take into account is gamers' behavior. Gamers are voluntarily spending more and more time with the games that they love, and that by nature drives you to innovate within those franchises, as opposed to maybe the behavior we saw a few years ago, where people grazed more, and sampled things from many different categories, and moved on. Now you have really long-standing relationships between gamers and the games that they love, and to an extent, we're responding to that behavior.
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