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Activision: 'We Might Have to Stop Supporting Sony'
by Alice O'Connor, Jun 19, 2009 8:56am PDT
Major publisher Activision might drop support for Sony's PlayStation 3 and PSP entirely if the consoles do not become more profitable, CEO Bobby Kotick has told The Times in an interview.
"I'm getting concerned about Sony; the PlayStation 3 is losing a bit of momentum and they don't make it easy for me to support the platform," Kotick explained. "It's expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better."
"Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation," said Kotick. He states that Call of Duty and Guitar Hero publisher Activision paid Sony over $500 million last year in royalties and other costs, quipping that the figure "probably still worked out at 400 per cent of the profit they made."
"They have to cut the price, because if they don't, the attach rates are likely to slow. If we are being realistic, we might have to stop supporting Sony," he said. "When we look at 2010 and 2011, we might want to consider if we support the console - and the PSP too."
Kotick adds that a new physical interface "could be ideal." Sony announced the motion-sensing camera PlayStation Motion Controller at E3 this year, arriving Spring 2010.
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I don't buy the real reason that it's expensive to make games for the PS3, after all they just port it over they already have a PS3 engine...
This is pure manipulation.
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The thing not mentioned at all here is that broad market penetration has far greater value than profit for an individual platform. Activision can be downright losing money on PS3 ports (which they currently aren't), and they are not going to stop making the ports, because that market coverage is far more valuable. Even if the PS3 stopped selling completely, the current market is sizable enough to keep Activision attached to it.
So yes, this is a simple PR play, and yes, it's at least partially working.
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Losing MW3 to Xbox 360 would be a crushing blow to Sony
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Also, I went to the Activision site to look up their current games for the above sentence, and holy shit they have a shitty line of games. Licensed bullshit and movie games are 75% of their titles.
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Truth is people love their shitty yearly franchise releases, and are in comparison only mildly interested in what exclusives the PS3 has to offer. Call of duty shows up every year and sells nigh on 10 million copies. Oh, Heavy Rain? Oh yeah, I'd love to see what an adventure game full of quicktime events looks like too, and the graphics sure do tickle my testes, but I'm a super hardcore gamer guy posting on Shacknews, as are you, and my tastes represent far from the majority, so that game can pretty much never hope to have CoD scale sales.
There's also another important factor: It's all about North America, and Activision as a very North America focused company has to take into account that something like three out of four current gen consoles in North American households are 360's.
Realities of a shitty market, PS3 fans. As a PC guy, I know how that feels better than you :P
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So Kotick's job is to find ways to maximize profit. If the games on the PS3 are not making enough profit for the the cost to develop them, then he has no choice to look at his options.
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Activision's titles on the console are generally profitable, COD4 sold like 3.5 million there and CODWAW maybe 3 million. Sure, that's only about half what they sell on 360, but that's still damn good sales and easily profitable.
Then again, Activision COULD just stop supporting Sony if they really wanted to.
Either way, this is a wake up call for Sony.
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Anyone "gamer" that is upset with that has problems.
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