Activision Talks Independent Games Competition

IG: Activision has been in recent months pretty widely criticized, whether fairly or not, by people in the industry, analysts, developers, etc. And a large part of that is likely due to the Infinity Ward situation. Is it Activision’s hope that having an independent developer contest will help repair the image of Activision as a big supporter of the development community?

LM: I know those questions are on people’s minds, but we do a number of things to foster the independent game community that we haven’t published as much. I see this more as a continuity of things we’ve already been doing. Being the number one third-party publisher, we sort of have a target on our back in a new regard, and sometimes that's how people see it when you are big and successful. One example is we worked on a project with USC and KCHE, which is the local PBS station in Los Angeles, on an educational game that I got to executive produce. We partnered with them and the game went to prototype to teach kids history. From that, two of the students involved in that project from USC, one founded his own company and the other just graduated and has two companies fighting over her partly based on the experience she had. 

We also have dozens of interns come in every year. We have both marketing and production interns, in our publishing business, and in our studios. But [our attempts at] trying to [boost] the knowledge of people making games is just not as newsworthy as giving away $500,000 in total prize money. I still feel it is a continuity of that effort.

IG: So how do you address the crowd that feels that Activision doesn’t treat developers fairly? 

LM: I think that our record overall speaks for itself. We’ve had an independent game development culture since Raven, our first external studio that came on board; they joined in 1997 and we had a 10-year anniversary with them back in 2007. [CEO] Bobby Kotick talked about how the model came out of that acquisition when working with Raven, and letting people run their own shops. We have a dozen or so developers operate on that principle. On the same token, I look at the deal we just did with Bungie in Seattle, and that to me is evidence that we are doing stuff right. They feel comfortable in trusting us to produce their products with them. That’s a pretty big catch; that’s a triple-A team, and that’s really our goal to have triple-A teams.

IG: Speaking of the Bungie deal; one of the key points of the deal was that they get to keep the IP. Just to be absolutely clear, for this contest, the independent developer that wins the money gets to keep the IP in this contest too?

LM: That’s a great question. If we do a publishing deal, then IP ownership is discussed, and we get the rights to it. For anything else that is submitted or doesn’t win, they keep their IP. One of the reasons we’re using an independent judging system and also using a third-party collection and submission process is that Activision won’t see a majority of submissions at all. Names will be turned into code numbers and all that sort of stuff to protect privacy and to protect IP if they submitted an idea and didn’t win. The ultimate goal here is that they are making their games, and if they win the prize and we don’t publish it, then that’s great, it’s theirs. We hope it comes out and we hope to get to play it.

IG: Is this something that you guys are hoping to make a regular thing, or is this a one-time independent contest to see how it goes? What’s the plan for this sort of thing going forward? 

LM: We announced this back in February. We’re just coming out with the rule set and how to do it, so we’ve been pretty darn focused with getting this thing launched. So we haven’t really made a plan beyond this; we have to see what the response rate is. “What happens when you throw a party and nobody comes?” That’s probably my number one core nightmare around this, if nobody submits. I’m really hoping that people come out and submit a lot of good ideas and we have a vigorous competition for the first round and then for the second round.

IG: You mentioned before how Activision has sort of fostered this development culture for a while, and I’m curious how the Activision philosophy compares to your biggest rival’s strategy. I’ve heard John Riccitiello at EA talk about the whole independent city-state for a long time, and how much they value development and studio culture, and it seems like in some ways that is a lot like what you're talking about at Activision as well. How do you think the two philosophies stack up?

LM: I’ve never worked at Electronic Arts; I have a lot of friends there and I know a lot of people that have worked there over the years, and a lot of current Activision employees are former EA employees, and I’m sure there is a few that go the other way as well. For us, because our system is set up in this way, it really works for us. The studios on our side are creative juices. That’s really where the best ideas come out of; we want to foster that and give them room to figure out new ideas.

An example of that is Vicarious Visions, which is one of the studios that reports to me. One of the things we did here a few years ago at VV was start an innovation lab, where small groups of people in-between projects can work on new ideas. A number of things, like the Guitar Hero: On Tour mechanic with the external fret controller for the Nintendo DS, came out of a small experimental team that was playing around with how to bring Guitar Hero to the handheld. So, we need to see those ideas coming up. It’s a little harder for me to look at EA, who have had a ton of success and say how they're doing it. All I know is that we have a ton of studios that work really well. We have studios like Sledgehammer that have come out of EA; a number of their employees came out and started a studio with us. I think what's working for us is keeping the culture that they want to have; it's our number one strength, and our differentiation from all of our competitors. 

We’ve never had a studio that has been re-branded. Our deals always leave the core management teams in place, and we pick up more of the business aspects of the company such as payroll, insurance and facilities and things we can really use our scale to benefit. Otherwise, if a team wants to run in a certain development way, then that works for them and then they do that. We don’t have a universal engine policy or anything like that. We leave the teams with their technology. That’s sort of our DNA that we’ve been programmed with. I started in the internal studio when it was just Activision Studios back in the mid-90s. Even then, I was on the Dark Nemesis team, we had a Mech Warrior team, and a Spycraft game, and those teams worked entirely differently, and that was more fostered than squelched.

IG: Thanks Laird and good luck with the contest.