Now that Activision has merged up with Blizzard all under Vivendi it’s time to consider what to do with all the additional overhead, management, internal studios and sheer amount of people working on projects within their organization. In other words, it’s time to trim the fat and get leaned out for the long haul.
This isn’t unexpected news, the only way to grow more effective as a large company is to remove some of the access baggage that can slow you down and let your competitors take control. This is a sad job which nobody takes pride in (most normal people anyway) but it could mean the difference between rising to the top and sinking like a brick.
“We are focused on improving efficiency across the combined organization and are concentrating on businesses where we have leadership positions that are aligned with Activision Publishing’s long-term corporate objectives,” Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith said in a statement. (gamespot)
It’s important to be aggressive as a large company, just like you would be as a startup company. There is a reason startup companies grow into powerful competitors that win, grow and eventually become (or be purcahsed by) larger companies.
As part of this move some staff will be migrated to new projects, persumably reporposed into other divisions or allowed to find new jobs somewhere else. This is called “realignment” by those in the management organization, and currently those up for realignment are:
- Radical Entertainment (Prototype, Crash of the Titans)
- High Moon Studios (The Bourne Conspiracy, Darkwatch).
- Massive Entertainment (World in Conflict, Ground Control)
- Swordfish Studios (50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, Cold Winter)
These realignments along with other organizational changes will effect a few working game titles:
- Brutal Legend
- Ghostbusters
- Wet
- Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
- World at Conflict: Soviet Assault
- 50 Cent Blood on the Sand
- Zombie Wranglers
- Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust
- Several Xbox Live Arcade titles
At this point we’re not sure which, if any, will continue to be developed under Activision and which will be sold off to other companies or retired. Surely, those money making titles will be sold off if Activision has no plans to finish them.
Again, it’s hard to consider this a bad decision. This is a decision of growth over having too many “Cooks in the kitchen” making soup. It’s better to have rock solid titles of epic proportions than a large pool of mediocre titles with minimal sales and bad reputations, and that’s why they spend a lot of time in the office working on this and having a type of office chair for long hours on a computer is really helpful in this area.
It’s not that the titles they’re questioning are necessarily bad, but are not the leading titles in their space and are should be either given a stronger team to work on them or retire them entirely. To build a stronger team with passion and direction it might be best to sell the franchise(s) to other organizations so they can do it right with time and attention to detail.
(Thanks, gamespot)
Famitsu Magazine is reporting the Nintendo console, Wii, has managed to sell 7-million units in Japan. This is roughly three times the number of Sony’s PlayStation 3, the console with superior graphics and power.
In before Herr_Alien. 🙂
Come on Paul! How many podcasts are you going to miss?
@GOG says customers hate DRM: Of course they do! Just like you said, DRM only hurts the customers and not the pirates. And yes, please bring back games filled with physical content, I would love to have stuff like that.
@QOTW: Sorry, don’t know of any DRM that I could tolerate. I know that pirates shouldn’t be accepted, but unfortunately there’s nothing that can be done about them.
@DynamicJul
😀 Actually it is a nice change. The time zone difference usually works in my favor (Eastern Europe), but it’s not completely impossible for somebody from US to get in first.
@EA forum bans cause game bans:
So apparently they didn’t fix the issue yet … they’re still using one database to handle the authentication for both systems.
If you think of it, you don’t even need two databases with the same user/password data, you only need separate databases to store forum bans from whole-account bans.
Correcting the bug should not be that difficult and it will make a huge impact for the better.
@piracy’s up 20% in past 5 years:
Games for free? Who would think this would ever be a lucrative business? 😛
I for one would pirate the shit out of Assassin’s Creed 2, just to point out that intrusive DRM is not ok. I’m not that much into that kind of game though, so …
@GOG sez customers hate DRM
And for good reason. As long as the code reaches the client, any DRM measures in it will be bypassed. Not might be bypassed, not could be bypassed, WILL be bypassed.
As for physical content, well, you still have those Deluxe editions.
@Steam user database cracked:
Not the best of the possible news. I don’t like to have the credit card info stored on servers, and in my envision of an online store, the credit card info is never stored. Yes, with every purchase you would need to type in the number again, but unless you check out very often (instead of putting more items in the basket then checking out) it should be quite ok.
@QOTW:
Steam, and the regular CD-key.
Jonah, regarding DynamicJul’s comment, I think you mean pseudo-code. And it’s not really about pseudo-code; as long as you know (1) what you want the program to do and (2) how to do it in one language, it will be easy to get the same thing from another language. The main hurdle in all software companies is not about learning a new language, is more about figuring out what the software you’re making is supposed to do.
Actually my time zone is GMT +1 so it’s the same. Also, I forgot to mention that my country doesn’t have things such as ‘Microsoft offices’ or ‘video game shops’ so I have to buy everything off the internet and it isn’t possible to fix an Xbox 360 over the internet.
Wait… taking fallout 3 apart and putting it back together again? This time it’s a brand new engine, so even if they learnt some stuff from the previous games, it’s not like they could reuse that much this time as they have done between previous games.