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Leaked Activision Memos Compare CoD, Guitar Hero

Posted by Soulskill on from the rehashing-innovation dept.

Gaming site Giant Bomb got its hands on some internal memos at Activision discussing the status of their flagship Call of Duty franchise. One exec asks, "Isn't Call of Duty today just like Guitar Hero was a few years back?" A response assures him that Call of Duty is more firmly entrenched than the recently-collapsed music game genre, and adds that Activision doesn't get enough credit for innovating. Quoting: "If you really step back and dispassionately look at any measurement—sales, player engagement, hours of online play, performance of DLC—you can absolutely conclude that the potential for this franchise has never been greater. In order to achieve this potential, we need to focus: on making games that constantly raise the quality bar; on staying ahead of the innovation curve; on surrounding the brand with a suite of services and an online community that makes our fans never want to leave. Entertainment franchises with staying power are rare. But Call of Duty shows all of the signs of being able to be one of them. It’s up to us. ... Activision doesn’t always seem to get the credit it deserves in terms of innovation in my opinion, but there is no short supply of it, even in our narrower slate." An editorial at Gamepro takes exception to this, saying that Activision should stop trying to milk its franchises dry.

19 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. That'd be the day by Nocturna81 · · Score: 2

    They stopped milking everything they own dry. Makes you wonder how long they can stay in business like that!

    1. Re:That'd be the day by Nocturna81 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Or as Penny Arcade put it: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/5/ (sorry for replying to my own post, I forgot to include that link)

    2. Re:That'd be the day by somersault · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly. I've bought one CoD game so far. Another came out a few months later and everyone seemed to want to play that instead, despite it being pretty much the same game, just with some different maps. Compared to how things were with Counter-Strike when I was really into my FPSes - free mod, hundreds/thousands of maps available to play for free that can be downloaded from servers if you don't have them... the whole DLC thing is just a massive step backwards for the consumer.

      I hate "episodic content" and DLC - if I know in advance that a game is planned in "episodes" I'll tend to wait until all of them come out before playing (for example Monkey Island 5 - great game, no real point being sold in "episodes"). As for DLC I tend to just avoid it unless it's very cheap, or very good.

      --
      which is totally what she said
    3. Re:That'd be the day by Moryath · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Crapptivision said the same thing about the other franchises they killed.

      Tony Hawk.
      Guitar Hero.
      Crash Bandicoot
      Spyro the Dragon
      The repeated - and getting worse and worse - Spider-Man games
      The repeated - and getting worse and worse - X-Men games (ugh, X-men fighting series from developers who didn't know crap about fighting games instead of more MvC... sigh)
      Yet Another James Bond Ripoff

      Someone needs to take all the Crapptivision execs, line them up, and fly down the line on rollerblades just slapping them all repeatedly till they grow some common sense.

    4. Re:That'd be the day by tripleevenfall · · Score: 2

      I think CoD is the exception in that they haven't run that franchise into the ground. They keep making compelling games.

      What I hate - and this is not limited to Craptivision or to COD - is that everyone wants to make a game into a community right now. The game has to be online-focused, you end up level-grinding just to use better than garbage starting weapons (MW2)...

      You know, this is a 1st person shooter. Strip away all the graphics and weapons, and I'm playing Doom again because the basic concept is fun. I don't want to be forced into an online experience with the difficulty set at insane (with human opponents), playing the same 10 maps over and over. I want a story. I want a campaign, character development, storytelling. I want to do story-based missions and otherwise play a console game.

      It's such a shame to waste a good game on deathmatches. We could tell a compelling human drama about war, but instead, you get a campaign you finish in 3 hours and then you end up playing capture the flag for a week before you're bored again.

    5. Re:That'd be the day by Stregano · · Score: 2

      As a Tony Hawk fan, and a fan of Tony Hawk Ride, I do see what they were going for with the ultimately failed Tony Hawk Shred. It is just one of those a little too late type of deals with that game (and Tony Hawk Shred is a much better improvement over Ride). It is just too bad that they did not make Tony Hawk Shred the first game and just take that extra time with it instead of pushing out Ride.

      The problem with execs running a game company is that I am willing to put money down saying that these execs are not big gamers. That is a huge issue. They are in it for the money and as long as their games continue to sell even if they are milking a franchise, they assume they are making good games. A really good game, like the case with Tony Hawk Shred, if it sells poorly, the company assumes it is a bad game and completely wipe away that entire development studio (yes, RoboModo is no more and a huge factor was the sales of Tony Hawk Shred).

      I could throw out countless examples, but the truth of the matter is that as long as there are execs in these companies that are more about the "bottom line" and less about the games themselves, this type of trend will continue. These execs do not play these games. They only go based off of numbers. Justin Bieber sells albums like crazy, but that does not mean his music is good. Bieber sucks balls.

      With Guitar Hero, that is just too bad. They just milked it too much. Had they stepped back and not pushed out so many, it would still be around. Think of the anticipation for Guitar Hero 2. Even Guitar Hero 3 had this anticipation for release (not as big as 2, but it was there). Then they tried to compete with Rock Band with Guitar Hero World Tour and then eventually Band Hero. They should have just stuck to what worked as they were making good sales.

      One of the issues is not all just the execs though, it is the way these games get purchased. Good franchises are now based on sales, so that means that even if it is a bad franchise that still sells, somebody is still buying it. The solution to this is very simple, but most people will not do it. What people do is during the next iteration of the game, purposefully don't buy it. If the game gets horrible sales, it will be seen that it was a bad game. Knowing Activision, they will try to release a "redemption" game for the franchise after that which will be significantly better (i.e. Tony Hawk Shred). So then we buy that one because it will be much better than the milked thing they pushed to us before.

      That will never work because people are dumb enough to purchase Madden every single year and buy every single CoD game that comes out. As long as people continue to purchase milked franchises, they will make them.

      --
      The world is how you make it
    6. Re:That'd be the day by keytoe · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't want to be forced into an online experience with the difficulty set at insane (with human opponents), playing the same 10 maps over and over. I want a story. I want a campaign, character development, storytelling. I want to do story-based missions and otherwise play a console game.

      My wife likes to play shooters, but she likes to play with me. This is incredibly awesome, but more and more games are making this impossible.

      We picked up CoD: Black Ops specifically because it claimed to support cooperative multiplayer. Turns out that the co-op feature only works online. As in, not in your house. I even did research before I bought the game, but every review just drooled all over it and said 'cooperative multiplayer' without further specification.

      So we got a single player game that neither of us want to play or we can get murdered in death matches by squealing 12 year olds. Or I could play co-op with some stranger I don't care about. So we just played zombies, which got old pretty quick. I'd say we got about $20 worth of fun for a game that cost $60.

      This whole 'build an online community at the expense of all else' bullshit needs to stop. I want to play games with people in my house. It seems the only company who remembers this is Nintendo. So my options are 'games for adults who aren't in your house' or 'games for kids who are in your house' - but that skips an entire group of people who want to play 'games for adults with other adults in the house'. There are a large number of us in this demographic, and we have money to spend.

      --

      Culture is more than commerce

  2. Sounds 'Too' Good? by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you really step back and dispassionately look at any measurement—sales, player engagement, hours of online play, performance of DLC—you can absolutely conclude that the potential for this franchise has never been greater.

    Wow, they sure think highly of themselves. Do they actually use this type of self promotion & recognition internally?

    In order to achieve this potential, we need to focus: on making games that constantly raise the quality bar; on staying ahead of the innovation curve; on surrounding the brand with a suite of services and an online community that makes our fans never want to leave.

    Marketing speak too? This sounds *too* much like a pat on the back to me. I wonder of they leaked this on purpose?

    1. Re:Sounds 'Too' Good? by Mindcontrolled · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Nah, I don't see any nefarious purpose here. This is just the usual corporate circlejerk - some underling telling the overlord what he wants to hear.

      --
      Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
    2. Re:Sounds 'Too' Good? by Sibko · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Sounds more to me like you're jumping on a bandwagon and hating what they do regardless of what they do. For example, this quote:

      If you really step back and dispassionately look at any measurement—sales, player engagement, hours of online play, performance of DLC—you can absolutely conclude that the potential for this franchise has never been greater.

      and you say:

      Wow, they sure think highly of themselves. Do they actually use this type of self promotion & recognition internally?

      Well you know what bub, was anything they said there actually incorrect? No! It wasn't! The series has a huge playerbase, sells well, engages people for hundreds of hours in multplayer. By every metric they use, the game excels and has the potential to be even better. So how about you set aside your elitist bias and preconceived notion and look at reality when it bites you in the ass. Call of Duty is popular, millions of people like this game, and the execs know that, and judging by this memo they seem to know that they need to improve their product for it to continue selling.

      Your entire post can be summarized as: "Stop liking the things I don't like!"

    3. Re:Sounds 'Too' Good? by Kelbear · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem with the statement is that they are metrics of success rather than potential.

      http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/3006-Metrics

      Metrics are backward looking, not forward looking. They examine what worked, and help the developers polish existing mechanics to the hilt. That's exactly what happened with CoD. It's an incredibly polished franchise that's enjoying tremendous success as a result of iterative improvement since CoD4's innovative improvement.(And yes, CoD4 was an innovative and difficult first steps, putting persistent leveling into an asymmetrically balanced FPS was breaking new ground, and required clever design decisions that were not done in other games/genres that used leveling, such as BF2)

      But metrics have limitations. They provide no information on ideas that are truly unique because if it really is a unique idea, there is no existing data. They cant have new ideas based on metrics. The most damning problem is that it fosters a risk-averse mindset, when they base all changes on metrics, and are suddenly confronted with the challenge of a new idea, they'll balk at the sudden lack of data because they're so used to having it.

      So even though CoD is doing great, and they have metrics that continue to polish it, the metrics don't give them any assistance in keeping it /fresh/.

      Sooner or later, the minor improvements won't be enough to hold onto an audience that's grown tired of the core game mechanics, and they'll need to do something groundbreaking again. It's been 3 games after CoD4, they should be worrying now while they're selling well, rather than wait for a future game to bomb and wonder what happened. Worse, what if they decide the future game shows that the franchise is burned out and discard it? They may never realize that it could have been revitalized for years to come if they just take a few risks with it...but the metrics of a failed sale will tell them to just ditch the franchise.

  3. Is there a story here? by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There really does not seem to be much that is newsworthy about this. Someone rightly asks the question whether this franchise could die off like their other one, but they are assured that it is still performing well but that they need to ensure that they keep improving the games.

    Wow. Captain Obvious does it again!

    Guitar Hero had a single, limited idea. There is just only so far that you can push the genre before getting ridiculous. The attempts to add things like a story mode to music games always fails, and since they offer additional songs as DLC then there is very little reason to upgrade to the next game.

    There is much greater potential for COD, so it will have a much greater lifespan. And if they stop "milking the franchise" then what would they do instead? Another shooter, but with a different name? Let's face it, the gaming public don't seem to have lost their endless facination with shooting people in games. Sometimes publishers can be faulted for having little imagination by producing sequels, but this is one genre where it is the gaming public who are to blame.

    1. Re:Is there a story here? by mordred99 · · Score: 2

      While I would agree whole heartedly with you about the vast majority of songs which are out there being only a fraction of what could possibly be out there. There were multiple barriers to entry into the guitar player games. 1) The songs had to have no swearing, or the artist had to be willing to bleep out those obscenities (which lots wont). 2) the record label and artist have to agree to put their song in the game. 3) artists have to spend sometime with the programmers or at least their "resident artist" to get the guitar parts down so they can make it close to real. 4) the artists chosen had to be "rock" enough to be a good song, and had to have enough appeal to be almost pop. Notice how many "metal" tracks there are outside of guitar hero: metallica.

      Again - this is not saying you are wrong - just adding to it.

  4. Activision and Innovation? by drej · · Score: 2

    Where's the innovation? First they copy Guitar Freaks and milk this new franchise dry, then they keep releasing Call of Duty games that basically only differ in their titles. Where does Activision deserve credit for anything besides overstaying their welcome?

  5. Did these memos escape... by Krokus · · Score: 2

    ...or were they... set loose?

  6. "...makes our fans never want to leave..." by Onuma · · Score: 3, Interesting

    CounterStrike (and CS:S) is still one of the most popular shooters in the world. It also has, to this day, a large competitive scene.

    What did the original developers of CS, and eventually Valve, do to make it such a long standing success? It was a FREE mod to anyone who owned Half-Life, and even when it went gold you could still download freely. Despite it being free, it sold 4+ million copies! Likewise with CS:S to anyone who owned HL2, this still sold 2+ million copies. You can still hop on either game and find tens of thousands of people playing on thousands of servers. While the later releases of the CoD series (COD4 and beyond, we'll say for our purposes) may have more users consistently playing, they're also not over 11 years old!

    Personally, I'm hoping that http://www.firefallthegame.com/, which will be FREE as well, also has the competitive nature and staying power of CS. Got to play it against the developers at PAX East '11 (they kicked the crap out of our group, btw -- all very solid players), and it's a nicely paced shooter which flows very well. Scott Youngblood (of Starsiege: Tribes) is the lead designer, and many of the devs come from the competitive shooter world; Quake, CS, Tribes, etc. They're all down to earth guys, but they also have the desire and drive to make a game for gamers, by gamers. Not this "Rehashing the same old bullshit", Activision-style.

    Making money should be the byproduct of a great game, not the reverse. COD4 had the right formula, but Activision milked it so hard and alienated the PC gaming community. That's a LOT of business they've lost out on.

    --
    What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
  7. Bad comparison by lyinhart · · Score: 2

    Sigh. GamePro. Why the heck are they comparing TV shows and movies to video game sequels? You'd be better off comparing them to sports. Year after year, we get the same sport, same rules, just shuffling the faces around and maybe changing the rules now and then. But that doesn't stop people from watching or playing them nor does it stop the games from being interesting. No, what's important in sports, like in video games is that you get some good competition and entertainment out of playing/watching them. You go in expecting a unique, fun experience when you play a sport or a video game, and from that you derive the entertainment value.

    I don't care if they release tons of Call of Duty games, as long as they're good. The problem with Guitar Hero wasn't the fact that they oversaturated the market, but because people got tired of it. Like Dance Dance Revolution before it. Like the Wii a few years after it was released. They cater to the "casual" gamer, who won't necessarily buy every new interation of a game and who will only play once in a while. Call of Duty is definitely different in that it ropes in the so-called "hardcore" crowd, the folks who will buy a game on launch day and are long time, repeat customers who play regularly. The only question is whether Activision can keep the quality level up and satisfy these gamers who have so many other games to play (Gears 3 is coming out, so is Rage and Duke 4) . And of that, I'm not entirely certain....

    --
    Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
  8. Bullshit talk by Tei · · Score: 2

    "raise the quality bar; on staying ahead of the innovation curve;"

    Call of Duty is a movielike experience in singleplayer, followed by a few maps and a quake3 like FPS. Theres nothing innovative in that, is a "blockbuster" formula, just that, a formula. Theres almost zero innovation in the game, other than the basic mechanics that are already done. Really this talk has not much to do with CoD at all. Is bullshit. But a executive talking bullshit is not new. These people are leechers that get the benefict from the work from the people under him withouth adding nothing.

    --

    -Woof woof woof!

  9. Wow... by FFOMelchior · · Score: 2

    "Activision doesn’t always seem to get the credit it deserves in terms of innovation in my opinion"

    We're talking about the same Activision that bought the Guitar Hero franchise, released an exceptionally crappy Guitar Hero 3, then added the full band concept into part 4 after Harmonix (the original creators of Guitar Hero) released Rock Band and made it popular? Oh, and then Band Hero, lol.