Activision’s head man said that only his company had the skills and knowledge that Bungie needed to realize its next project.
Activision-Blizzard’s expertise will be an indispensible part of Bungie’s new project. That’s according to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, who said that Bungie had had “no alternative” but to sign with the publisher.
Speaking at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in California, Kotick said that Bungie had realized that it and everyone else in the industry, was “deficient” at providing the services necessary to create “great, competitive products,” leaving the studio with no choice other than Activision.
Kotick seemed to suggest that the skill that Bungie had been specifically looking for was customer services acumen, something that Blizzard had in spades. “Blizzard has 2500 people in customer services just for World of Warcraft,” said Kotick. “How you train them, how you manage them, how you organize them, how you use CRM tools to be really effective in satisfying the expectations of your audience is something that no other company had.”
The mention of Blizzard and World of Warcraft will undoubtedly cause speculation that Bungie is going to launch some kind of MMO. While a product similar to WoW would be quite a departure for the studio, an MMOFPS along the lines of the long-running Planetside is less of a stretch, especially considering the expertise that Bungie has gained in online multiplayer with the Halo series. This is all speculation however, and all we know for definite about Bungie’s new project is that the studio is building a new engine for it.
Source: Eurogamer
Published: Sep 16, 2010 01:34 pm