Activision Blizzard CEO Robert Kotick’s presentation at the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference in San Francisco yesterday has been widely reported, with most sites leading with his comments on playing Guitar Hero without a console.
However, there were some other interesting, bits in there too, especially seeing as i subscribe to Bill Wyman’s stance on the whole music game phenomenom (I should stress I don’t share his views on the acceptibility of dating 13 year olds though).
When not extolling the benefits of console-less plastic instrument bashing, Konick boasted of the business acumin which helped Activision net a sevenfold increase in profits last quarter. In particular, the heartwarming measure of designing the employee incentive program so that it “rewards profit and nothing else”.
“We have a real culture of thrift,” Konick continued. “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.”
A commendable aim if ever there was one…
Less controversially, Kotick also spoke about new realtime rendering and mouth movement technology Activision has been working on, commenting that “Call of Duty: World at War didn’t have proper facial expressions for players to get emotionally attracted”. It’s a fair point, the facial animation in Call of Duty isn’t up to scratch. Nevertheless, away from Activision, some games look to be doing it rather better, Heavy Rain for example.
The new animation system won’t be ready for some time, but it should arrive before the next generation of consoles, Kotick said. This doesn’t represent a particularly strict timeline however, as he added that publishers aren’t currently taking full advantage of the the current generation of hardware and he would normally expect about two years notice from the hardware manufacturers before introducing a new console. something which, to date, he hasn’t recieved.
More at Gamespot.
