Slashdot Mirror
Leaked Activision Memos Compare CoD, Guitar Hero
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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