I’m figuring that most people here are interested in games, not businessmen, but Activision’s CEO Bobby Kotick spoke at the DICE 2010 summit today. It’s an annual think tank for the bigwigs of the game industry; often there are some interesting speeches about the future of the industry and things like that. It’s not really an event where people uncork hot new gameplay videos or make huge announcements. But Bobby Kotick made some anyway — the biggest in my opinion being the casual announcement of the 2010 Activision Independent Games Competition.
There weren’t many details offered, but here’s the basic outline: You present Activision with your creative game concept in text and video, and you might win enough money to make that concept into a living, breathing game. More details are “coming soon” and I don’t know them yet. But if you’re an indie developer or even dreamed of being an indie developer, I figure this is good news. When I find out I’ll pass it on; there are obviously many more details that need to be announced anyway. For now, I guess you should be brainstorming your game ideas and polishing your prototypes accordingly. [Update: There was some paperwork online but apparently it had the wrong info, so I'll link to the right info when it's posted.]
For me, that was the biggie of the speech. Gamasutra has a pretty concise wrapup with lots of quotes, and if you missed GamePro and 1Up‘s live blogs, you can replay them. But here’s some stuff from the speech I found interesting:
- No PowerPoint slides. It was just him talking, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. It was all rather personal and a lot of time was spent talking about his early days as a software developer and playing Defender and Infocom games.
- He mentioned that pitched a game himself back in the day and it didn’t get picked up.
- He underestimated Harmonix when making the deal to acquire Guitar Hero. “We really didn’t even think, hey, we should go to Boston and meet these Harmonix guys and see what they’re up to.” He also suggested that it could have a profitable partnership. I almost wished he’d said “we could have made beautiful music together.”
- He doesn’t play a lot of games because he’s afraid it’s basically all he would do. His addictive personality makes it too tempting, so this is as close as he can get. “”If I was regularly playing Modern Warfare 2 I would not be able to stop and it would be at the expense of all my other responsibilities.” I think this is a bit like someone with lots of points on their license owning a Ferrari dealership. You do what you can to be close to what you love.
- He clarified the whole “taking the fun out of making games” quote as a joke told to a room full of bankers — he’s referring to the wild, irresponsible companies that surrounded him back in the day who thought the business of games was supposed to be fun too — and they went bankrupt having all that “fun.” I remember saying that was probably what he meant on KOXM back when he made the comment, and I was right. Yeah, he should have said it differently, but at this point, all you can do is clarify or let people continue to beat you to death with your own words.
- He said, “I thrive on seeing someone so inspired that they’re up at 4am creating content at the expense of their family life.” I strongly suspect this was his way of saying “I love it when people are really passionate about what they do” but it can be read (and has been reported) as “Ignore your children and get back to work!” I suppose your interpretation entirely depends on whether you like seeing Bobby Kotick as a guy in charge of a company who speaks to a large audience uncensored, or you have more fun making him out to be a monster.
