Kotick: "Our Spider-Man Games Have Sucked For The Last Five Years"

N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Apparently Activision Blizzard's CEO Bobby Kotick thinks that their Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years.

Destructoid said:
Let's talk Activision's Spider-Man games. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows? Garbage. Spider-Man 3? Sucked. Spider-Man: Friend or Foe? Nonsense. Spider-Man: Battle for New York? Drivel. Ultimate Spider-Man? Spider-Man 2? Trash.

Hey, don't shoot the messenger, guys. Instead, look at Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, who in a recent Game Informer interview admitted that the publisher's Spider-Man titles have been less than acceptable over the years.

"Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years," he tells the magazine when talking about learning about commitment to quality from Blizzard. "They are bad games. They were poorly rated because they were bad games."

"We went away from what is Spider-Man," he continues. "It's about web-slinging. If you don't do web-slinging, what is the fantasy of Spider-Man?"

Oh boy. I hope he's not hinting that we can expect a bunch of Wii/Natal/Sony motion controller Spider-Man games. You know, to capture what it's like to really sling, uh, webs. Didn't work out so great for Tony Hawk, though. Might I suggest a Spider-Man: The Musical game using the Guitar Hero engine?
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Source: http://www.destructoid.com/kotick-activision-s-spider-man-games-have-sucked--160930.phtml

I don't know what happened to the real Bobby Kotick, but given our luck so far, this new Bobby Kotick will release a Spider-Man game on par with Arkham Asylum while Activision subsequently loses over a billion dollars.
 
"Our...games...have sucked for the last five years."
"We went away from what is Spider-Man," he continues. "It's about web-slinging. If you don't do web-slinging, what is the fantasy of Spider-Man?"
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The games with webslinging IN them were shitty. Like Spiderman 3.
 
"Web slinging" wrist peripheral confirmed?

Joking aside, it's nice to see even Kotick realises just how bad the Spiderman IP has become under his stewardship. He's halfway there now, all he has to do is get it fixed, a much harder prospect.
 
The last Spiderman game I played was on the Playstation. I don't remember the whole name, but it was awesome.

I think making a good Spiderman game, considering the free roaming and web slinging elements, is difficult to do. I say this without having played the recently released ones, though.
 
kbx8cx.jpg
 
Here's what you do: Steal everything inFamous did. Just playing the demo of that damn game told me you haven't made a good Spider-Man game in a while.
 
a_Quarius said:
Bobby Kotick is an idiot in general. I wouldn't expect him to do anything amazing with a beloved franchise.
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Given the sheer amount of mass success his company has achieved, I'd say he's either very smart, very lucky, or a strong combination of both.
 
a_Quarius said:
Bobby Kotick is an idiot in general. I wouldn't expect him to do anything amazing with a beloved franchise.
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Bobby Kotick is brilliant. He's just not well-liked.

Anyway, I'm guessing this is probably a direct reaction to Arkham Asylum. Not just the quality of it, but the marketing, the tone, the idea of delaying a game to polish it, none of that is really heard of at Activision. They're making a sequel and people are actually excited about it instead of going "Oh, maybe I'll pick that up."

I would not be surprised to see a new Spider-man which takes a few cues from Arkham by E3.
 
Diebuster said:
I've only played the first movie tie-in game, but isn't 2 generally considered the best of the Spidey games?
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Arkham Asylum aside, it's pretty much the best super-hero game, let alone Spidey game. (Imo anyway)
 
Vinci said:
Given the sheer amount of mass success his company has achieved, I'd say he's either very smart, very lucky, or a strong combination of both.
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Well, lately he's been operating under a slash and burn business model.

In the short term, this does work amazingly well, but in the longer term it tends to burn your franchises into the ground. EA did a good job showing this actually when their licensed games stopped selling and all their franchises were worthless as they had driven them into the ground. Activision is now also seeing this with Guitar Hero, which went from raking in two billion in revenue with Guitar Hero 3 to absolutely tanking off a cliff.

I think he's finally realizing what EA learned the hard way, that if he keeps doing this, the company as a whole is going to go down the drain in a few more years. All of the sudden he's going on about quality and delaying several projects for quality concerns, whereas before he was pumping out games as fast as Activision could make them, which tends to be a sign that he's rather worried about this now.
 
Nirolak said:
Well, lately he's been operating under a slash and burn business model.

In the short term, this does work amazingly well, but in the longer term it tends to burn your franchises into the ground. EA did a good job showing this actually when their licensed games stopped selling and all their franchises were worthless as they had driven them into the ground. Activision is now also seeing this with Guitar Hero, which went from raking in two billion in revenue with Guitar Hero 3 to absolutely tanking off a cliff.

I think he's finally realizing what EA learned the hard way, that if he keeps doing this, the company as a whole is going to go down the drain in a few more years. All of the sudden he's going on about quality and delaying several projects for quality concerns, whereas before he was pumping out games as fast as Activision could make them, which tends to be a sign that he's rather worried about this now.
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He'll retire before that happens, I'm sure.

I think he knows full well this is short-term success.
 
ShockingAlberto said:
He'll retire before that happens, I'm sure.

I think he knows full well this is short-term success.
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Well, he has been cashing out his stock lately, so it's quite possible.

Though, to play devil's advocate, he is at least talking about taking a concern with quality instead of pumping out a few last titles to make cash on before he leaves, which seems... odd if he's intending to bail out.
 
Nirolak said:
Well, lately he's been operating under a slash and burn business model.

In the short term, this does work amazingly well, but in the longer term it tends to burn your franchises into the ground. EA did a good job showing this actually when their licensed games stopped selling and all their franchises were worthless as they had driven them into the ground. Activision is now also seeing this with Guitar Hero, which went from raking in two billion in revenue with Guitar Hero 3 to absolutely tanking off a cliff.

I think he's finally realizing what EA learned the hard way, that if he keeps doing this, the company as a whole is going to go down the drain in a few more years. All of the sudden he's going on about quality and delaying several projects for quality concerns, whereas before he was pumping out games as fast as Activision could make them, which tends to be a sign that he's rather worried about this now.
Click to expand...
What's funny is that I read an interview where he admitted there would be fewer ___ Hero games in 2010 and they were going to focus on higher quality products. Quite a change of pace from his "exploit" mantra a year or so ago!
 
I thought Spiderman 2 was kickass. Everything else was pretty bad though. Too bad Prototype and Infamous have already provided good sandbox superhero games. The bar is even higher now.
 
ShockingAlberto said:
Bobby Kotick is brilliant. He's just not well-liked.

Anyway, I'm guessing this is probably a direct reaction to Arkham Asylum. Not just the quality of it, but the marketing, the tone, the idea of delaying a game to polish it, none of that is really heard of at Activision. They're making a sequel and people are actually excited about it instead of going "Oh, maybe I'll pick that up."

I would not be surprised to see a new Spider-man which takes a few cues from Arkham by E3.
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Agreed. The article in GI, ill assume thats where they got this from, really tried to make him out to be someone who wasn't a monster. I got a feeling he was passionate about games but even more passionate about making money. He's persistent and from what I could tell he put a lot of him into his company.

Now the part in the article about him wanting his studios to keep their identity was something I never would have expected from him.

Am I the only one who thought of john C. Reilly from the picture in GI ?
 
He never said Spider-Man 2 sucked. That was Destructoid's paraphrase and lack of math. SM2 was released in 2004.

And I doubt he was being super specific about it actually being five years. But from what I've heard, everything since Ultimate Spider-Man has been not-so-hot.
 
Big game companies seem to go in a cycle:

1-- Company releases good original games
2-- Company's good games aren't selling amazingly compared to other company's cash-in's.
3-- Company decides to release a few cash-in games, and make millions
4-- Company shifts almost entirely over to being a cash-in factory
5-- Company's games start getting slammed, and no one game sells any useful amount
6-- Company starts making their franchise games good, find they sell better that way
7-- Company decides to release some new Ips
8-- Company releases some good original games

Activision seems to be entering step 5 (stuff like Tony Hawk Ride and BH seems to have opened their eyes). Ubisoft just recently went through step 6 and the beginning of step 7 (with the recent release of AC2 and announcement they're getting out of the wii shovelware racket) EA seems to be going back into step 2 after Dead Space and Mirror's Edge.
 
Nirolak said:
Well, lately he's been operating under a slash and burn business model.

In the short term, this does work amazingly well, but in the longer term it tends to burn your franchises into the ground. EA did a good job showing this actually when their licensed games stopped selling and all their franchises were worthless as they had driven them into the ground. Activision is now also seeing this with Guitar Hero, which went from raking in two billion in revenue with Guitar Hero 3 to absolutely tanking off a cliff.

I think he's finally realizing what EA learned the hard way, that if he keeps doing this, the company as a whole is going to go down the drain in a few more years. All of the sudden he's going on about quality and delaying several projects for quality concerns, whereas before he was pumping out games as fast as Activision could make them, which tends to be a sign that he's rather worried about this now.
Click to expand...

All this guy really cares about, in terms of games and quality and all that, has to do with Infinity Ward and Blizzard. So long as those make huge bank, anything else is just icing on an already delicious cake.
 
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