There's an interesting editorial over at IGN about whether or not Activision is the most evil company in the world. While a lot if it is pointless fluff (comparisons to Pfizer, BP, Halliburton etc.) there are some good points in the latter part of the article. There's also the irony of an IGN article tackling such a subject in an editorial. You know, IGN, a company with a notorious reputation for giving overly favorable reviews to games or movies that pay hefty prices for advertising on their site. Yeah, those guys.
As much as I love using IGN as a resource, since they've got all kinds of tentacles in every bit of the world of video games, the bigger they gotten (I've been following them since they were Imagine Games Network) the more of their integrity seemed to be for sale, and the less professional some of the writing seemed to get.
Hey! We can get away with a lack of professionalism in our writing here, it's a blog. So there.
I digress.
I'm not going to get too much into the IGN article, you can follow the link and read it for yourself if you're interested, instead I'm going to give my take on the question of just how full Activision's evil-o-meter is. Since I've already stated that I worked at Activision recently, you are free to grab your grain of salt and hang on to it for everything that follows, but keep in mind I am still a gamer, and I still love Tim Schafer. Onward.
The biggest issue with thinking of Activision is evil is thinking of it as a singular entity, rather than a company made up of people. To say Activision is evil is to say that every employee of Activision is evil (or bad or crooked or greedy or whatever else the general gaming population associates with Activision) which is simply not the case. The people I worked with in the QA department were some of the nicest, coolest people I've ever had the privilage of working with. This includes the Senior testers, Project Leads - you know, the general boss types - and not just my fellow testers. So already the idea that everyone at Activision is out to trick gamers into paying as much as they can for whatever crap Activision poops out should be busted. There's more to it than that, however.
Actvision is just the publisher, they're "the money." They don't have as much influence over the actual games as many people seem to think. Activision provides the funds to pay the salaries of the people that do makes the games (Infinity Ward, Treyarch, RoboModo, etc.) as well as take care of advertising and actually getting those games on shelves. Any issue you have with the game itself falls on the name of whatever developer you find sharing space with Activision on the back of the box.
This reputation of being "evil" didn't materialize from nowhere, however, so there must be some merit to it, right? Scooping up Red Octane and the Guitar Hero name while kicking the company that created the franchise, Harmonix, to the curb is a move that can only be described as douchetastic. A similar descriptor could be applied to leapfrogging developers on the Call of Duty franchise in order to release series entries on an annual schedule. A move that almost certainly led to the infighting and implosions that affected Infinity Ward. What about kicking Double Fine to the same curb as Harmonix, then attempting to sue EA for the rights to Brutal Legend once it looked like there was some serious buzz about it? Douchetastic to the max. But, who is responsible for all these actions really? Individuals. More specifically, businessmen.
Businessmen trying to maximize profits for themselves and for shareholders. These people are not interested in whether or not their company's game does something new, or "pushes the envelope" or if the game's audience thinks it was a real improvement over the previous incarnation. They're only interested in whether or not people buy it and, so long as people continue to buy Call of Duty and other such games in record numbers, there's no reason to change the way things are going. But this is the struggle that has existed between publishers, developers and gamers since almost the inception of the video game industry. Gamers want some new experience, some significant improvement, developers want to push the limits of their ability and publishers simply want as large a return on their investment as possible. Do the higher-ups at Activision employ some of the more dastardly methods in order to accomplish that goal? Absolutely. But a few years ago the same thing was being said about EA, who is now considered the "good witch" to Activision's wicked witch. Which means some of you need to consider the fact that I'm trying to work in a good Wicked analogy here.
All this talk of how Activision is a publisher and as such is run by businessmen, rather than gamers, can't be complete without mentioning the man every gamer looks upon as Satan's earthly minion: Bobby Kotick. While the level of direct involvement Kotick had in some of the more dubious actions I've mentioned is something I can't comment on with any kind of accuracy, the man's reputation in the public leaves little doubt about how his company came to be considered "evil." Let's review some of his more recent appearances in the news: Lost a lawsuit levied against him by a law firm because he never paid them for providing defense in a sexual harassment suit that he also lost. A suit which was birthed from the "company" he and five friends created to manage their private jet in order to get tax write-offs for the use of said jet. Doesn't exactly create a warm and/or fuzzy feeling in regards to the man. But this kind of behavior isn't exclusive to Activision, the video game industry or even businessmen. Isn't one of the reasons we have "class warfare" and an arguably malfunctioning economy due to CEOs, VPs and the like preferring to dissolve entire buildings full of people that live from paycheck to paycheck rather than forfeit the profits that allow them to drive two Bentley's and have a "summer home" on an island whose name takes practice to pronounce properly?
When it comes down to it, Activision isn't really evil. It's simply a publisher run by a businessman displaying some of the most despicable traits associated with both. I'm sure if the public was able to dig deep enough they'd find there were people besides Kotick responsible for some of the most offensive decisions the company has made. Maybe not. So perhaps there are individuals in charge that could easily fall into the definition of "evil" but their actions are representative of only themselves, not the entire company. The worst thing I can think to accuse Activision, as a company, (rather than specific individuals) of is laziness. Rather than take the huge profits created by their biggest franchises and use them to branch out into new, potentially groundbreaking and risky IPs, the people in charge of the company simply rests on their laurels; assured that the next Call of Duty game or World of Warcraft expansion will buy Kotick another jet.
Should this change, and Activisions starts using those profits to take risks, birth new franchises or simply allow adequate development time on current franchises to create a truly "new" incarnation (again, much like the about-face EA did not too long ago) gamers will simply find another company to paint the evil target on. Because that's just the nature of video games, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone else.
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