19-09-2010, 08:04 PM
Well, I’m sure we’ve all heard of Bobby Kotick… No? Well he’s the bloke that runs Activision.
You hate him yet? Nope? Well you will soon
Withholding InfinityWard’s royalties
A little less known fact about Activision is that they never paid InfinityWard (The creators of the Modern Warfare series) the royalties that they were owed, and there’s STILL a court battle going on so that the original IW heads get paid the $36 million they are owed.
…And no, that’s not a typo
Activision decided that the heads of InfinityWard (West and Zampella) were insubordinate and were therefore fired because of that. However, West and Zampella seem to think (and I’m inclined to believe them over Kotick) that there were plans to fire the pair before their royalty cheques came in.
No dedicated servers
The infamous “No dedicated servers in Modern Warfare 2” argument/discussion has gone on for almost a year now. InfinityWard made the announcement, but guess what? Yep, it was Activision’s idea in the first place. Apparently it makes it easier to catch cheaters… How many nukeboosters do you know that have been banned? Or people that exploit glitches? And we’ve had to put up with laggy, high latency servers for the past year that Kotick sticks to his guns
But that’s ok, because in Black Ops they’re giving us…
Paid dedicated servers
Hang on a minute, they’re wanting to let us have dedicated servers this time around, but we have to pay EXTRA for it?
For those who don’t know, they’re wanting the hosts to pay £9.95/month for a ranked server, or 66p PER GAMER for an unranked server, with a maximum of 24 players.
Here’s hoping one of our good hacker friends manages to crack this pretty soon after the release.
Pay-to-watch cutscenes
"If we were to take that hour, or hour and a half out of the game, and we were to go to our audiences and say to them, 'Would you like to have the StarCraft movie?'... at a $30 or $20 price point, you'd have the biggest opening weekend of any film ever,"
Words from the immortal idiot himself, charging people to watch what they usually would on a cutscene anyway.
And yes, you read that right, “$30 or $20 price point” I for one have no idea what films he goes to watch, but I certainly don’t pay that much to go to the cinema (even including chocolates, drinks and KFC afterwards).
“Exploiting already-profitable franchises”
It turns out that Activision won’t support any of their older franchises unless they’re $100m+ franchises (or have the ability to be). This means COD will continue, but the <insert instrument here> Hero games could die out soon because they’re not making enough money
Tl;dr:
Don’t buy Activision, the head is a greedy bastard who’s obviously had his grey matter swapped out for treacle porridge.
You hate him yet? Nope? Well you will soon
Withholding InfinityWard’s royalties
A little less known fact about Activision is that they never paid InfinityWard (The creators of the Modern Warfare series) the royalties that they were owed, and there’s STILL a court battle going on so that the original IW heads get paid the $36 million they are owed.
…And no, that’s not a typo
Activision decided that the heads of InfinityWard (West and Zampella) were insubordinate and were therefore fired because of that. However, West and Zampella seem to think (and I’m inclined to believe them over Kotick) that there were plans to fire the pair before their royalty cheques came in.
No dedicated servers
The infamous “No dedicated servers in Modern Warfare 2” argument/discussion has gone on for almost a year now. InfinityWard made the announcement, but guess what? Yep, it was Activision’s idea in the first place. Apparently it makes it easier to catch cheaters… How many nukeboosters do you know that have been banned? Or people that exploit glitches? And we’ve had to put up with laggy, high latency servers for the past year that Kotick sticks to his guns
But that’s ok, because in Black Ops they’re giving us…
Paid dedicated servers
Hang on a minute, they’re wanting to let us have dedicated servers this time around, but we have to pay EXTRA for it?
For those who don’t know, they’re wanting the hosts to pay £9.95/month for a ranked server, or 66p PER GAMER for an unranked server, with a maximum of 24 players.
Here’s hoping one of our good hacker friends manages to crack this pretty soon after the release.
Pay-to-watch cutscenes
"If we were to take that hour, or hour and a half out of the game, and we were to go to our audiences and say to them, 'Would you like to have the StarCraft movie?'... at a $30 or $20 price point, you'd have the biggest opening weekend of any film ever,"
Words from the immortal idiot himself, charging people to watch what they usually would on a cutscene anyway.
And yes, you read that right, “$30 or $20 price point” I for one have no idea what films he goes to watch, but I certainly don’t pay that much to go to the cinema (even including chocolates, drinks and KFC afterwards).
“Exploiting already-profitable franchises”
It turns out that Activision won’t support any of their older franchises unless they’re $100m+ franchises (or have the ability to be). This means COD will continue, but the <insert instrument here> Hero games could die out soon because they’re not making enough money
Tl;dr:
Don’t buy Activision, the head is a greedy bastard who’s obviously had his grey matter swapped out for treacle porridge.
