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Kotick Frustrated By Xbox Live Model
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick would like to break the walled gardens of online console services like Xbox Live.
The executive told the Financial Times he’s frustrated by existing business models that see companies like Microsoft benefiting most from the success of online third party content, such as that released for Activision’s Call of Duty series.
Gamers racked up 1.7 billon hours of Call Of Duty online play between November 2009 and April 2010. While Activision has profited from phenomenal Call Of Duty retail sales – the most recent series release, Modern Warfare 2, has now cleared 20 million sales - and made money from record breaking downloadable content, the company wants a bigger piece of the pie.
“We’ve heard that 60 per cent of [Microsoft’s] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call Of Duty,” Kotick said. “We don’t really participate financially in that income stream. We would really like to be able to provide much more value to those millions of players playing on Live, but it’s not our network.”
Kotick said new game machines will be needed for publishers to better monetise online game play.
“We have always been platform agnostic. [Consoles] do a very good job of supporting the gamer. If we are going to broaden our audiences, we are going to need to have other devices.” Kotick said Activision will “very aggressively” support moves by Dell and HP to connect PCs to TVs.
Kotick said previously that consumers are “clamouring” for an online, subscription-based Call Of Duty service and that he’d love to launch one if possible.
His latest comments echo those of Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada, who said recently: “The true battlefield is the respective network services that support consoles… First and foremost I would like them to come up with a network infrastructure that will allow the publishers like us to freely design different business schemes. For the publishers the advantage of the networks is that it allows more types of diversified revenue models and I don't want their networks to interfere with that."
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Shouldn't the title of this article be 'Kotick Frustrated Someone Else Making Money'?
This is the same moron that laughed off the Warner Bros CEO last year when he whined about not getting enough money from Activision for music liscencing for the Guitar Hero games.
Kotick argued that the 2 businesses were mutually benificial and that WB was basically getting advertising and boosts in iTunes downloads from having their music in the GH games, and getting paid for it! And he was right.
Here he is making basically the same argument that he scoffed at when the roles were reversed. Take your own advise Bobby, the sooner you realize that the popularity of XBL is a major reason for the COD juggernaut (pun intended), the better off you'll be.
I'm doing the math and I don't get it. Maybe someone can explain what I am missing from this dope CEO ranting. Can someone explain to me how MS is making tons more money on LIVE from the sale of Call of Duty?
I can understand if MS is getting a ton of new people on LIVE because of Call of Duty but I highly doubt that is the case since there were a ton of people on there for Halo. Last time I checked, I don't think COD significantly increase LIVE subscriptions. Did I miss something here?
This monkey should take his one trick pony and go elsewhere. Clearly he doesn't understand gamers or the market. Sorry fans out there but PC gaming isn't even in the same solar system. So let him go head long with his subscription service and try to duplicate WOW. With games like Battlefield and Medal of Honor, this fool doesn't realize that his window of domination is closing real fast.
He's a character isn't he?!
Are users really “clamouring” for an on-line subscription service; Really? “clamouring”?!
How much mileage do they think they are going to get with from this tired arena death match format? Not happy with record breaking sales on two, let's be honest; rather mediocre first person shooters. Which pale in their comparisons to many, many others that I would happily list if it weren't to further inflame fanboy anger.
I wonder how much more money ATVI could have pocketed if they had cut off their executive team's sniffing money instead of bitching about XBL's publisher model?
Bobby, put down the yay and A&R some new IPs already!
Oh, and if making more money online is your boner of the month, launch a browser-based gaming portal and resell all of your exinct properties to the semi-casual crowd.
I love LACKtivision!
Please feel free to correct if I'm wrong here, but aren't most people on Xbox Live for Halo? Wasn't it Halo 2 that built the foundations of what XBL is today? Call Of Duty can just fuck right off. Trading in MW2 soon for Red Dead Redemption. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Bobby!
It's the games equivilent of 'My mate's a steward..."
Given that Call of Duty games were 2nd, 3rd and 4th in terms of Unique Users in 2009, with Halo 3 above them all, the only place he can have heard this on is the Call of Duty forums.
well, unless 2nd+3rd+4th equates to more users than 1st on it's own, which seems reasonably plausible?
I'm not sure what you mean by "unique users" though, and having no access to the figures, that's just a guess.
Ehhh...
It's a frustratingly insidious process isn't it? These people would sell their grandmothers, then steal them back and sell them on again.
As a dealer Bobby should know the first rule, there is a limit on how much you can cut your product with chaff whilst inflating your prices before all the junkies look for a better fix elsewhere.
Kotick wants to support PC set top boxes so he can charge people to play their one game that anyone has any interest in going online with? Now I am 100% certain that he made Activision profitable by accident.
Kotick said previously that consumers are “clamouring” for an online, subscription-based Call Of Duty service and that he’d love to launch one if possible.
Is this before or after you have charged them £50 to buy your game? I know you are a businessman but consumers are not lining up to have the pissed ripped out them by you.
Have your online subs model but make the game available for a nominal fee. I somehow doubt you will go down this line. Shame really.
If they did an COD lost lots of players but the $$$ earned goes up. Would they care? Activision wants to be most profitable. Not most liked or regarded as the best at whatever...
Milk it till its dead then move on. As done with Tony Hawks. Just try to keep the it alive as long as possible. Oh an remember to realise that your game has peaked an that just as it does you can up the price an people will pay because they are in such a hype about something that really doesn't deserve it....
codtroller plugged into codbox... using special square cod disk... played on codbox monitor. An you'd still have to buy the games an DLC an subscribe..
I'd pay to play the drums on Kotick's head....
I can see why this guy is a successful businessman, always looking out for the bottom line.
As much as I understand his point, I just can't hear this greedy moaning anymore. You had 8 million dollars to blast out in L.A. just to please your press guys for no other reason than making them happy. Please make your own console, release a subscription-based model for your game(s) and leave me alone. In theory he's absolutely right, but in reality the users can't/won't afford 34 accounts for all their games. At least I won't.
Any given day I feel more and more disconnected to the future of games. I don't play games competitivly online, I very occasionally download DLC for games (even the free stuff), my PS3 is online once a month max, I pay 60 Euros a year for XBL and can't exactly tell why and I only enjoy a round of coop-gaming every here and then. I don't want Kinect or Move or 3D and the most anticipated games for me from this year's E3 are either oldschool (Bulletstorm, Twisted Metal, Portal 2, Enslaved, Driver, Need for Speed) or non-mainstream (The Last Guardian, El Shaddai) What is wrong with me? Am I the only one with a job and some taste? ;)
Same thing here. I don't want to wave my arms like a retard in front of the TV and 3D gives me a headache (plus it's too gimmicky for my taste). I do enjoy modern games, but for the first time I have the feeling that current developments are going to keep me from gaming in the future.
I couldn't agree with your 2nd paragraph more. I've been playing Ninety Nine Nights two and have enjoyed that way more than I did MW2 and many of the triple A titles that have released over the last 6 months. Ninety Nine Nights has had virtually no coverage and I've yet to even see a review for it.
I don't think anyone really likes MS' little nazi walled garden. There is web browser, paying for free sites like Facebook is down right criminal, imo and developers are forced to play by MS' rules.
It's no surprise that the PS3 is proving to be a good viable solution and people are willing to speak their mind now.
I think online play would have been better publisher, with, at best, a guarantee that they have to maintain the servers for a minimum amount of time. Sure some publishers may run shitty servers but I never had a problem with PC online gaming. There is no reason console gaming has to be run like a prison camp.
Surely a large percentage of players are buying CoD for the online play? Meaning the game was put out at retail with that as a major reason to purchase? The developer has reaped the rewards at retail so why shouldn´t MS benefit through the live subscriptions? They are the ones providing the infrastructure for the online components to be enjoyed.
60% of phone users rent lines to talk to their mums.
That doesn't mean my mum is due a royalty payment from BT though does it!
P.S. Hello mum!
*waves*
He could always try and release a CoD game without xbox live support?I get the feeling that if Live hadn't been around, number four would not have done nearly so well, same with number five and MW2, people don't buy them for the single player. Don't be a bitch, Kotick, without it you wouldn't even sell half as many.
i didn't think of that and it's probably the biggest point to raise. I agree that without the hard work put into making Live a stable and user friendly environment CoD wouldn't have sold so well to the casual market in the first place.
The problem i see with the whole "they will pay for it" mentality that started with the £5 price hike with MW2 just because "people will pay it" is that you'll only realise you've gone to far when "no one pays for it" and you're left standing there looking like an utter dweeb
Perhaps Activision needs to take things to the next level and make their own console.
codbox?
as much as I hate to, I fully agree. I have friends on xbox live who haven't played any other game since MW2 came out. It literally hasn't left their disctray. In the wider scope of the workplace, friends and family, people that truly fit the description 'casuals'.
They buy the yearly COD game and maybe a football game of their choice and that is it for the year. I hold the opinion that this casual market is much bigger than the core gamer and if these casuals are willing to spend £10 a month for COD online, you can't really argue with the buisness, which is all this industry is at the end of the day.
I have about 5 or 6 games that have been slain by MW2. It's hard to put down if all your mates are online playing it every time you boot the box up.
there are publishers out there who at least attempt to foster creativity and don't try to milk every franchise for all it's worth. Sony is one of them, and EA is increasingly becoming another. Nintendo may milk most of their franchises, but it's usually forgiveable with them, as they produce top-notch quality through creativity. all this to say that no, i don't really believe this industry is strictly a business. making money might be the biggest part if it, but when that becomes the ONLY part then you'll get no quicker declination of the industry. that's the path Activision's taken, and as high and mighty as they are now, they'll probably fall harder than any other publisher before them.
good points, well made.
I think saying sony doesn't milk franchises is a bit of a stretch though. If GT4 makes a gazzilion euro's theirs gonna be a GT5 (eventually)
yeah, but in that franchise's 13 year history there's only been four (not counting GT5) proper games. conversely, there have been at least 6 CoD games (not counting Black Ops) in half the time, and there's been little to no changes from one game to the next.
don't get me wrong, i'm not saying Sony doesn't milk franchises too (that's one of the reasons Ratchet and Clank has gotten stale lately), but they're usually more willing to take a chance on unproven, original IPs than anyone, especially Activision. there are very few publishers that would be willing to take a chance on something like Heavy Rain, for instance, or produce games like Ape Escape, Ico/SotC/Last Guardian, LBP etc. and a number of Sony's first and second-party studios went on to create new franchises during the seventh generation than what they'd created previously.
"We've heard" ...what a cock!
60% of Live subs are for CoD only?
**** off Kotick, honestly, **** right off
you've got two ponies Kotick, one you leave in the stable with it's owners and the other one you seem intent on whipping until it turns to glue. Desperately trying to eek every last penny from your holy grail smacks of a company with nothing else to offer.
I really wouldn't be that suprised if he was right you know.
it's funny hearing the vocal minority (amongst which i include myself) rag on Kotick. but the truth of the matter is, there are about 20 million people willing to agree with and give him what he wants. and that probably won't change until a bigger gorilla claims his throne.
I'd be surprised if the vast majority of his customers know who he is.
I don't get it. Didn't FFXI have a subscription fee on live?
If so, I don't see why cod couldn't do the same thing, if the kotickulator thought it would be a good idea (I won't be playing it either way).
Holy Terra i seriously want to kick this guy.
So, Activision now want to charge us a fee to play CoD, because they clearly haven't made enough money from it already. Poor Bobby having to work with the same online framework as everyone else and with CoD barely breaking even for them, thank god they have Warcraft to keep them afloat or they'd all be begging on the streets by now! Perhaps they should set up as a charity, then we can all give them our money for nothing!
Haha, this is awesome. Pick a side, hardcores!
Oh, you've heard, have you? Shut up, Bobby.