Once upon a time, Activision Blizzards CEO Bobby Kotick kicked a few franchises to the curb: Riddick and Ghostbusters. No doubt, this was a result of the Activision and Blizzard merger requiring some resources to the merged together while others were cut from the lineup. Phil Harrison, the new big suit at Atari/Infogrames has raised these little birds from the ashes with a dream to build them into 100-million dollar franchises.
While Bobby Kotick said the titles, “don’t have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises,” Phil Harrision sees it as a personal challenge to prove him wrong.
“What Bobby, perhaps unhelpfully said, was that those games were franchises which wouldn’t make $100m of revenue and generate sequels. If that’s his benchmark, then fine — and we’d love to aspire to the same benchmarks. But you know what? I would love to turn Ghostbusters into a $100m franchise, just to prove him wrong.” (1up)
In many ways, this is the difference in attitudes from a large firm compared to a smaller firm with strong goals and a vision for success. Activision Blizzard is big now, perhaps the biggest publisher in the industry, they can’t be bothered with minuscule 80-million dollar franchises. Others, like Atari, strive to take a title from nothing to something of greatness. Granted, Atari’s failed in a lot of franchises, but with their new ex-Sony executive behind the helm things could turn around and this might be the first step.
Most of the best game franchises in existance today started from nothing but a dream. Big publishers don’t have time to dream, they’re too busy making money off the fanboys of their current franchises.
My roommate has the white PS4 that was bundled with Destiny.
I recall playing DotA when it was new in 2005, but I haven’t played it in years because I disliked teammates “feeding” (dieing a lot) and being killed by multiple opponents because my teammate(s) wouldn’t declare MiA (missing in action) heroes in their lanes.
Regarding why people in RTS and MOBA games click constantly might be to help their reaction time, as I, too, did that; it would let me know relative server latency.
I never played LoL, HotS, or DOTA2, but I have spectated DOTA2 to see my PC’s performance, and DOTA2 got a Vulkan update, so I’m hoping for the next Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, or Valve game to use a good Vulkan implementation.
I enjoy watching Super Mario Maker, “Retro” category games, nostalgic games, and high requirement games because I’m using an old PC until Zen arrives, and I, too, use Twitch to preview games.; it, also, serves as “background noise”.
I watch StarCraft 2 and other RTS games because I’m no good at them anymore.