Bobby Kotick, the infamous former CEO of Activision Blizzard, has revealed on a podcast which studio acquisition taught him ‘an expensive lesson’ almost twenty years ago. While sitting down with Bing Gordon, former Chief Creative Officer at Electronic Arts, Kotick took a stroll down memory lane, looking back over the last forty years of the gaming industry.
When it was mentioned by Gordon that Kotick and his team had a ‘flawless’ mergers and acquisitions record, Kotick set the story straight by mentioning one studio buyout that was less than ideal. In his words, it was an $80 million lesson.
‘We Wrote it Off’
In a recent episode of the ‘Grit’ podcast, which at the time of publishing is unlisted on YouTube, Kotick took a quick dive into an awful acquisition that Activision made before merging with Blizzard in 2008.
He said:
It’s not true, we actually had a bad acquisition.
We bought the company that was in Manchester that did the driving game for Xbox, and it was called… (blanks)
They had a good guy who was running the day-to-day, but he was like… A brilliant guy who — like a ‘McKinsey guy’, and he was in strat planning.
It was $80 million and we wrote it off two years later. It was everything — everything about it violated all our principles.
That guy was an expensive lesson.
In this segment, Kotick is referring to Bizarre Creations, the developer behind Project Gotham Racing, a series of titles that were exclusive to the Xbox platform. While the acquisition left Microsoft with the PGR label, Activision would lean on Bizarre Creations to piece together ‘Blur’, which was released in 2010, three years after the 2007 buy-out occurred.
Blur was intended to be released in 2009, but it was delayed by Activision to allow Bizarre to further polish the game.
Less than a year later, Activision closed Bizarre Creations, dissolving the studio (which was based in Liverpool and not Manchester, as Kotick suggested) and releasing around 200 employees.
To this day, the Project Gotham Racing series stands abandoned
Kotick went on to walk Gordon through Activision’s former acquisition processes, which were centred mostly around retaining the identity of studios and allowing them to keep doing what they were already doing. By contrast, he explained how Electronic Arts – Gordon’s former company – would ‘take over’ acquired studios and rebrand them, stripping out their image somewhat.
In the same discussion on the Grit podcast (props to GameSpot for the link), both Gordon and Kotick explained that, once upon a time, Electronic Arts almost purchased Activision and Blizzard, which would have left franchises like Call of Duty under the EA umbrella.
Do you miss Project Gotham Racing? Let us know about your experiences with the age-old series on the GPlayr forum.
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