14 DAY TRIAL // A lot of gamers were a little annoyed when, just a few, short weeks after the merger that created probably the biggest publisher in the world, Activision Blizzard announced that it had ditched many games that had been under development, and meant to be published by Vivendi Games.
Among them were Ghostbuster, which apparently found its way to Atari, and the expansion for World in Conflict, which was being developed, at that time, by Massive, and that does not have a publisher yet. Other axed games included The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand and Brutal Legend.
Bobby Kotick, chief executive officer of Activision Blizzard, has tried to justify the move by saying 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.”
He has also added that, “You still need to have production of new original intellectual property, but you need to do it very, very selectively. And if you look at the number of new original intellectual properties successfully launched in the market each year over the last five or ten years, it’s a small, single-digit number.”
In other words, the above-listed games were not published by Activision, because there was little to no potential to create money-making sequels for them. It really seems that Activision is turning into the Electronic Arts of some years back, which only dealt with franchises and series. The result? Electronic Arts is not taking losses, and talks about creating original games. Let's hope, however, that it won't take Activision a few years of producing lame sequels to come to the same conclusion.