1) Bobby Kotick openly expresses his disdain for games.
Unlike many CEOs, Kotick is quite happy to insult his customers at every possible chance. He does not like gamers, or games, or game designers. He likes money, and lots of it. While this doesn't upset a gamer (making boatload of money off games is usually their life goal), it does upset them to hear comment such as:
"The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."
or
"The best of all margins – the 25 per cent operating margin business –
has the potential as we can see with World of Warcraft to be a 50 per
cent operating margin business."
2) Bobby Kotick admits he wants to exploit gamers.
Any customer who is told that they are just meat is likely to dislike you for that.
"With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of over time becoming $100 million plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us."
and
"there will continue to be opportunities for us to exploit the PC platform in ways that we haven’t yet."
3) Bobby Kotick is insensitive to the current economic atmosphere.
Kotick has said many times that he wants to charge users monthly, or per day, to play his games even after having been purchased at industry-standard prices. He has an interest in raising the prices of his games, and would do so if not for certain standards imposed by outside forces.
"And Tony, you know if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further."
and
"If you think about the success that we've had in other product categories on subscription, you can get a sense of the direction that we want to take that franchise" (Concerning Call of Duty franchise)
and
He pointed to changes he implemented in the past as being particularly beneficial, such as designing the employee incentive program so it "really rewards profit and nothing else."
and
"You have studio heads who five years ago didn't know the difference between a balance sheet and a bed sheet who are now arguing allocations in our CFO's office pretty regularly,"
4) Bobby Kotick purposefully stifles innovative games, and creates a uncomfortable work environment.
Rather than produce anything new or innovative, and 'risk' not making at least $100M profit on it, he kills anything that shows up, already existed, or is acquired in another company. Also, as shown in the next quote, his idea making the most profitable third party publisher depended on creating "a company culture infused with skepticism, pessimism, and fear."
Considering Activision's recent habit of pumping out yearly sequels regardless of quality and bundling as many games with overpriced peripherals as possible, it's not really surprising to find out he has this sort of management style. What's really shocking to me is what obvious contempt he has for the creative process of making video games, to the point where he would actually say things like this
on the record.
"I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."
and
"Why don’t we start with the Vivendi Games businesses -- there were a lot of different projects and businesses that we identified as not likely to achieve the profit margin potential that we look for."
and
"With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of over time becoming $100 million plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us."
and
"It’s harder to attract development talent to projects that are more speculative in the long run, and so what we found is that if you have a [need] for innovation in existing franchises, that’s a recipe for margin expansion and you still need to have production of new original intellectual property, but you need to do it very, very selectively"
and
"And again, our strategy, narrow and deep, focus on properties that will sell to a very broad consumer base on the console -- those are strategies that seem to work well."
