[QUOTE="2beers_in_hand"]
[QUOTE="Boomshaffted"]
I doubt Activision has that kind of power. It's Blizzard/Activision for a reason. You don't see 2K/Firaxis, EA/Bioware, etc... They're partners - Activision doesn't run Blizzard, and Blizzard knows they have an *extremely* successful business model and haven't seriously tampered with it for almost 20 years. Heck, I'd imagine Activision knows this too...
Besides, Activision effectively built up all three of those franchises and, while it has torn two of them down, they always have other things in the works - CoD isn't their only active franchise, after all. Who knows what they'll push into the spotlight in the future? None of us, that's all I know.
Boomshaffted
But Timstuff summed it up pretty accurately when he said that Acti is no longer trying to innovate besides CoD what does Acti have left as a major cash cow??? Prototype is not the answer it didn't sell to the levels that TH, GH or CoD have reached in the past. What other games does Acti have???
Well, here are some links for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Activision_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision#Studios
You'll see lists of games they've made or published there and, since 2005, they've been involved with some of the most large scale names in the entertainment world. The potential is undeniably there for making another cash cow.
What's more, seeing as they're incredibly profitable at the moment, they're more than capable of buying promising new devs, putting them to work on IPs of interest, and going wild.
As for Timstuff... He says they "don't have any star franchises left." They essentially had Tony Hawk as a star franchise for a good period of the 2000's, then that started to peter out. They then made Guitar Hero, and that was a big one until it petered out. Now they've got CoD. At any given time, they've only ever really had one big star franchise, and they MADE an up and comer into a star franchise after that. They have promising IPs in their stable, good developers, and who knows what that we aren't aware of? They've got the means, they've got the talent, they've got the IPs - it's all good and fine to speculate, but, Activision is so far away from having nothing left to turn to it's ludicrous that some of you seriously entertain the idea. What?a) They didn't 'make' guitar hero - Harmonic and RedOctane originated the game/brand with GH1 with Activision as the *distributor.* It's like crediting EA with L4D, as they handled the retail distribution with Turtle Rock / Valve actually made/published the game. Activision bought the publisher of the game immediately afterward, ditched the developer, and by the general opinion of the industry spent the next few years screwing it up. It didn't 'peter out' so much as they 'ran it into the ground.'
b) Call of Duty has been around since 2003/4 - again, not so much something Activision 'created' as something they inherited, by picking up the ex-2015 MoH developers and letting them do what they did best. It evolved into its current paradigm roughly around 2005 with COD2. That more or less parallels GH's shelf life.
c) IIRC they just posted a nice loss this past quarter, and that was *including* BLOPS.
c1) Also IIRC, Blizzard alone was responsible for something like 35-40% of Activision's revenue. Have to double-check to make sure there..
Log in to comment