Activision CEO: WoW Killer Would Cost a Billion
February 29th, 2008 by Rajiv Ashrafi in Business, MMO, News, PC
The MMORPG market is well saturated with quite a few good titles, but is still dominated by World of Warcraft, the reason for which Activision merged with its owners Vivendi to create Activision Blizzard. This is noted by company CEO Bobby Kotick at an investor meeting where he comments that it would take an investment of almost a billion dollars to create something to rival WoW’s popularity, and even then, success wasn’t guaranteed.
“We don’t think that even if we made the USD 500 million or billion-dollar investment to get a product out [to compete with WOW] that we would even be successful doing it,” he said. “When we first started looking at it, it appeared to us like a game in an insurmountable product category… EA, Microsoft, Sony and scores of venture capital investments had been put to work unsuccessfully in trying to develop massively multiplayer games as a product opportunity.”
He commended the guys at Blizzard, saying that they have a model that is “very well-developed” and that they have a “keen understanding of their audiences.”
Tags: Business, MMO, News, PC
