Quite the kerfluffle was caused on Gamespot when Brenden Sinclair posted a story about Robert Kotick's comments at the Deutsche Bank (does anyone else see this phrase and just naturally pronounce it "doosh bonk"?) Securities Technology Conference in San Francisco. Without belaboring the idiotic observations Kotick made, let's instead focus on the loose justifications that certain commenters were giving in defense of his remarks:
1. Kotick was just being sarcastic. Look, I understand the compulsion to assert this time-honored defense, but let's be real honest: corporate bigwigs do not use investor symposia to wax smartass, okay? In fact, these forums are generally very sterile and calculating, meaning that you can pretty much accept what the talking head says at face value. When he said he is running Activision according to a certain ideology, I think you can safely assume that he means it.
2. Kotick did not mean that he was taking the fun out of video games themselves; he was just affirming that the process needs to be businesslike. If you go out of your way to make a statement about "taking the fun out of" anything, you are doing yourself no great favor from a public relations standpoint. Everyone naturally assumes that a CEO has designs on profits and maximizing his labor force; it's an understood and accepted premise of capitalism, for God's sake. But to say it openly reeks of a certain smugness or arrogance of which his employees certainly can't be too fond. Let's be realistic--if your boss is out there talking about bottom lines and stripping away the enjoyment of work, does that give you much faith in his leadership? Single-mindedness has torpedoed many an enterprise before.
3. The untethered Guitar Hero idea is a good one. Consoles aren't going anywhere. Competition is too great, production costs are dropping, and programming gets progressively easier. So why abandon that to take an aging concept into a new, dangerous realm with uncertain production costs? Kotick's views on the untethered Guitar Hero concept are fine in theory but flawed in practice. Three years ago he might've been hailed as an innovator; now he simply looks like yet another CEO who does not have his finger on the pulse of what's popular and what's relevant.
4. Being gung-ho about profits is the right business model. You can't force profits, folks. Simple economics says that you cannot hope to thrive if your sole focus is on the bottom line, neglectful of those line items that get you to that point. Taking coffee out of the break room is a short-term Band-Aid for a greater problem. Maybe Activision can still thrive with the likes of Infinity Ward producing excellent Call of Duty games, but the well eventually runs dry on gaming franchises and contracts with developers. You can talk ad nauseam about the need to trim fat, but humans still comprise the business and still expect to be treated like humans. If you are hammering home the politics of fear in an effort to make the corporation flourish, your strategic approach is going to eventually be what causes your downfall, and we've all seen that bear fruit during the dot-com bubble-bursting of 2000 and the gaming collapse of the mid-1980s. To disregard history is to condemn one to reliving it.