By Dave Long on Thursday, September 6, 2001 - 10:28 am:
This kind of pisses me off. Activision reinvented themselves by focusing on PC games. They got the rights to publish id games which certainly led to humongous sales and profits with Quake II/Quake III Arena. They also published Raven's hits and misses and Mechwarrior II was a big seller in all its forms. Without the PC, which was where they made their money in the lean years, they'd be dead. They were this close to losing it all just two short years ago. Then they lucked out with Tony Hawk. They got a console hit right when the Playstation was the rage.
Quote:...the company has given free rein to Ronald Doornick, president and chief operating officer, who joined Activision in 1988 from food group Con-Agra. He has been strongly identified with efforts to streamline the business, and kill off poorly performing games, particularly in the PC market.
By Mark Asher on Thursday, September 6, 2001 - 12:23 pm:
I'm not convinced that the console market is going to be as fertile as they all think. Sure, the next gen systems will generate a lot of buzz, but unless the player base grows they won't sell more software.
This Christmas season we may see more games than ever before all competing for sales. Are there going to be more customers?
By Rob_Merritt on Thursday, September 6, 2001 - 01:08 pm:
Well the PC market isn't what it use to be. This shouldn't surprise anyone.
By Chet on Thursday, September 6, 2001 - 01:16 pm:
Dave, should Activision really invest money where they don't see money coming in because they owe us something? I am not sure what they owe us, I didn't buy Quake to support activision, I bought it because I liked playing it.
Chet
By Dave Long on Thursday, September 6, 2001 - 02:05 pm:
This was just my angst-ridden gamer side coming out. There's no surprises to me in their brutal assessment of the markeet that rebuilt them. I just feel like Activision is so quick to turn their back on their customers when it suits them. They did it countless times with patch support of their games and now the PC-side in total gets the same treatment.
I don't think they owe me something. But I would like to see some customer loyalty returned by loyalty to the market I paid to support while they were building their company.
I think what really gets me is that the cyclical nature of consoles means they'll be begging me for cash for their PC games when the console market goes away again in three/four years during the next transition period. Publishers seem to like to distance themselves from developers and make us think they have nothing to do with the products. They have the most important string to pull of all...the funding.
--Dave
By Ben Sones (Felderin) on Thursday, September 6, 2001 - 02:34 pm:
"Well the PC market isn't what it use to be. This shouldn't surprise anyone."
Isn't it? Do you have data to support that? Because last I checked, the computer market is still growing, and has never really stopped. So it's considerably more than it used to be, even if consoles are currently considered a bigger growth market.
What you have to remember is that everything in this industry is cyclical. I remember when consoles were dead--it wasn't that long ago, and that market was in considerably worse shape than the PC market is now. Then when PC games really started to take off--when Myst happened, really--people started piling on the PC bandwagon because there were riches to be made. Over the years, perhaps too many people piled on, and that's why we're seeing so much consolidation right now. That doesn't mean the industry is hurting, though. Just because game publisher X is in bad shape, that doesn't mean the industry is going away (although publisher X might).
I predict (disclaimer: I hate making predictions, but I'm going to make one anyway) that the console market is about to experience the same cycle. Starting... now. Everyone is jumping onto the console bandwagon, and I don't think the market is going to sustain that kind of growth. Maybe for a few years, but not indefinitely. Smart publishers know that it's wise to diversify their projects, decrease their risks by spreading out their investments to cover more than one market. Publishers that abandon the PC platform to cash in on the console gold rush (which may or may not even exist--we'll see when we start to get some figures back on game sales for all three next gen systems) may find themselves in an awkward position when the bottom drops out in a few years time.
We'll see...