Tag Archives: innovation

Activision’s Bobby Kotick, has told The Economist that despite criticism that the company is too dependent on exploiting franchises, many gamers feel the opposite.

“A small segment of very vocal gamers say everything has to be new and different every year,” he told the site. “Actually, people are happy with existing franchises, provided you innovate within them.”

The trick, according to Kotick, is to strike a balance “between the familiarity of a trusted brand and ‘innovative and inspiring’ new features.”

Guitar Hero 5 is out in September.

Via EndSights.

Speaking at DICE in Las Vegas, Gore Verbinski has urged developers to push the boundaries of innovation and asked why companies insist on “making another Halo” when there are “so many other places to go.”

“This is the time for madness,” he said in his conference keynote. “This is the time to go down dark alleys.”

Verbinski is best known for directing the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

“As you have success, the business model gathers data and focuses on those successes,” he said. “An empty canvas is a dangerous investment, but once a few dots are connected, the business model can and must connect to those early successes and follow them in an otherwise unguided terrain. Success creates followers. That landscape narrows, and we start to migrate along those paths at the expense of our explorer instinct.”

The director has a point. He warned the games industry off the film business model, in which creativity has collapsed under the weight of numbers.

Verbinski pointed to the film industry’s creative collapse, as the greenlight process became less and less instinct and more and more a numbers game.

“I think we can all agree that film narrative has become stifled and derivative as language is borrowed over and over,” he said.

DICE runs till Friday. Full article here.

Speaking at DICE in Las Vegas, Mitch Lasky – former head of EA Mobile and now a partner at Benchmark Capital, has blamed Sony and Microsoft for me-too trends in games development, not the grouping of smaller companies.

“Don’t blame consolidation,” he said on the subject of lack of innovation in games. “Blame Sony and Microsoft for jumping the budgets up to $30 million for a console game. That’s not consolidation’s fault.”

Of course, an unhealthy lack of innovation in games is nothing to do with the way publishers like EA operate.

“Publisher have got to make their numbers,” he said. “It’s all about mitigation and growth.”

DICE is running until Friday at the Red Rock resort in Las Vegas.