Activision has mostly avoided the call to do more social and mobile games like what its main competitor Electronic Arts is doing. However, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick recently revealed that they are taking a good long look at Facebook as a platform.
Sometimes we need some kind of a specialized skill like right now there is a lot of work being done on Facebook games, said Kotick. We ve always been a platform agnostic company, we ve always said, if you have a platform and you have a big enough installed base of that platform we ll evaluate it as an opportunity to make games on. And Facebook, with 750 million users, clearly has enough of a platform. The challenge always is, can you deliver a shareholder return by investing in said platform, and in the case of Facebook we think we can.
But the skills that are required to do social games on a Facebook platform include analytical skills that are different than what we have in our business intelligence unit today. So we ve had to go out and find people who have these unique kinds of skills and there are very few of them that actually have proven their skills, he added. So you have to find people who have the characteristics of being able to develop systems to analyze game play or game behavior.
Kotick also revealed that development schedules now include marketing budgets. We have a ‘green light process,’ and it s evolved over a very long period of time, said Kotick. But it s a pretty exhaustive process, very milestone based, and there is a whole process of peer review where you ll come in and show a prototype or a game concept. Now actually includes all the marketing, because the marketing is so integrated into the game experience. The green light process has evolved to include all the marketing materials, the marketing schedules, the marketing vehicles, to be creative.
Source: Forbes
