Let’s talk about price.
No, let’s talk about price and perception. No, let’s talk about price and misperception. Let’s talk about price and arrogance. Let’s talk about the difference between cost and value. Let’s talk about it in real world terms.
I know a guy who has a business-oriented product, a training product. It sells for $4,500 per person. My acquaintance is convinced that this price is fair – cheap, even. Having seen the product, I actually agree.
But.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun beat me to this story, but our friend Bobby Kotick (the man we all love here at Tap), has been delivering speeches at the (Bank of America) Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in California. Evidently not happy enough with the gazllions of pounds Activision already makes, he’s now touting the idea to sell pre-rendered cut-scenes to fans as feature length videogame cinematics…
Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions is a stud. I mean, this is the guy who gave us Psychonauts! Grim Fandango! Day of the Tentacle! Full Throttle! If I ever meet him I will kiss him. He probably wouldn’t appreciate it, but still. But I don’t think Tim will kiss Bobby Kotick, Activision/Blizzard CEO and asshole. There is no love there. But Tim is a nice guy and has apologized for calling Kotick a “prick,” …
I… I… i agree with something bobby kotick said. This must mean the end is nigh, people. The world is about to be torn asunder. Stock up on canned goods.
It’s been a little since Activision/Blizzard scumhole CEO Bobby Kotick shoved his foot so far into his mouth that it came out his ass – he’s been too busy cornholing his most profitable studio to be verbally inflammatory – but who can forget such lovable quotes as this and this? But the Most Hated Man in Gaming is at it again, telling the Wall Street Journal that fans are “clamoring” for a subscription-based Call of …
The stampede toward the exit continues at Infinity Ward, despite parent company Activision/Blizzard still refusing to pay the studio hundreds of millions in royalties owed for the success of Modern Warfare 2. The current departure list stands at eleven, not including the fired COO/CEO/CTO/CCOs Jason West and Vince Zampella. According to a source I know within Infinity Ward, more are likely submitting their resignations today, and even Activision has now admitted that it expects more …
Speaking at DICE (thanks Kotaku), Activision/Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick apologized for said he didn’t mean it when he advocated “taking all the fun out of making videogames,” and that “an atmosphere of skepticism, pessimism, and fear represented ‘mission accomplished’” for his developers. Words are cheap; you’re gonna have to do better than that, Bobby. Also: salad, motherfucker. It’s what’s for dinner.
It may be a matter of public record that I harbor a certain degree of dislike for Activision/Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, but really only in the sense that I wish him an eternity of pain and suffering at the claws of specially-trained torture demons, that his blighted genescape be eradicated from this earth as one might eradicate smallpox or plague. But I only feel this way because his pompous bean-counting has already damaged a creative industry, and he’s intent on turning that creativity into something that can be quantified on a spreadsheet. Still, reading my latest Game Informer, I could hardly blame Kotick for the remark that he wouldn’t have paid seven million dollars for Blizzard in 1995. Of course, he later paid something like 18 billion dollars for the company, but that was later.
It’s in vogue these days after Kris Graft eloquently defended the various malignancies of Activision/Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick to support the man, claiming he does all he does as an effective executive officer and not as an imp of Satan himself. Of course, then Kotick goes and does something like giving a speech to the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference, during which he said – didn’t imply, said – that his goal is to “take …
The degree to which I hate Activision/Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is nigh-unmeasurable. I loathe the man; I hope he falls into a deep, deep hole with ground glass and spikes and hot lava and sharks and scorpions and poison and fire ants and chromic acid and knives and dead puppies at the bottom. I didn’t think it would be possible – you know, physically – for me to despise anyone in the games industry more …