Focus on Call of Duty and World of Warcraft Allows Activision to Create Engagement

Ever since its merger with Blizzard, video game publisher Activision has been accused of eliminating any attempt to innovate and of relying on the same core franchises, including Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, in order to generate revenue.

But at least one leading executive working at the company believes that a sharper focus on limited number of gamers allows his team to create better experiences and solid fan bases for the games.

Eric Hirshberg, the chief executive officer of the Activision Publishing division, has said, “I look at it through a different lens. Those fewer titles are generating more engagement and more willingness to buy additional content and more willingness to stick with a game than ever before.”

He added, “Games have always been a less disposable medium than other forms of entertainment, and they’ve become exponentially less disposable, because people are showing this desire to go deeper and deeper into the worlds that they love. There’s no other medium that can deliver that hundreds and hundreds of hours of engagement. And so I think that’s a big opportunity.”

The CEO says that there’s a lot of innovation linked to all the games that Activision is publishing, but the company prefers to deliver it in more concentrated packages rather than spreading it out among more games.

Activision has reported that the solid financial results that it has posted for the last nine months of 2011 were linked to Call of Duty, both the new Modern Warfare 3 and sales of the back catalog, World of Warcraft, the MMO from Blizzard, and the newly launched Skylanders video game and toy line, which proved a big hit during the Christmas shopping season.

The company has already announced that Call of Duty is getting another title in fall 2013, although the developer and theme have not been announced, while Skylanders will get a new Giants expansion, both in the digital and the real world.