Activision's Dan Winters

On Beachhead and digital roads, Guitar Hero and why the publisher isn't the evil empire it's made out to be

Feature by Dan Pearson Contributor

Published on April 14, 2011

GamesIndustry.bizWhat can you tell us about Beachhead? It seems like a sensible direction to take at least part of the Call of Duty franchise towards. Also it makes sense to explore new business models with a well-established IP. What are you looking at for that?

Dan Winters

We're exploring everything right now. The Beachhead group is really a group of investigation, exploration, trying to look at what business models could and should be pursued. We have a very large audience of people who have an appetite for really high quality content. They've got the challenge of trying to figure out how to deliver that content, and how to meet the appetites of the consumer, which we hold a lot of value in.

Those 25 or 30 million people who are playing Call of Duty online mean a lot to us. We consider them to be part of our family. We want to feed our family, so we want to feed that consumer as well. They're looking at various ways to do that.

GamesIndustry.bizIs it going to be the primary focus of Activision's digital business going forward?

Dan Winters

I think it's safe to say that Digital distribution is fast coming up on the horizon, we are very strong in our retail business, our ability to move boxes, we're very confident in that region, but we also recognise that there are different ways to get content to people. Whether it be, down the road, cloud computing or digital distribution, these are all just additional roads for us I think, for getting content to the people who are part of our family.

That's certainly a part of it. We're still looking at ways to compliment what we're doing, or to create new pathways to reach folks. It's all still part of the exploration.

GamesIndustry.bizIs there anything you can say about True Crime? Its cancellation was announced as part of the series of cuts which also saw the end of Guitar Hero...

Dan Winters

Actually, just to clarify, we're just putting Guitar Hero on hiatus, we're not ending it. We're releasing products out of the vault - we'll continue to sustain the channel, the brand won't go away. We're just not making a new one for next year, that's all.

GamesIndustry.bizPresumably True Crime is definitely dead though? Activision was very candid in its assessment of the prospects for that game when it was cancelled, saying it simply wasn't going to be good enough to compete... It was obviously a long way through the development process, was it a decision to protect your reputation by cancelling a sub-par game or was it purely commercial in that it was expected not to make money?

Dan Winters

I think that it was a piece of both. We think that the game was tracking to be a very good game. The question was really the size of the prize based on how good it could be. We are confident that thing would of been eighty plus. Eighty five maybe. They're a really talented group at United Front. We were really confident that they were tracking towards a very good game. But...The challenges in the market place right now, when you're talking about open-world games that are going to compete with titles like Red Dead Redemption, expectations for the consumer are really high.

Actually, just to clarify, we're just putting Guitar Hero on hiatus, we're not ending it.

That would have been, and still might end up being, a very successful mid-tier opportunity for someone. But, as I said, we changed our business model to where we were going to change our business model to focus disproportionately on three big, huge monsters. Those three monsters are the Bungie, Call of Duty and Spyro titles.

So that left the True Crime title being a mid-tier opportunity which we felt was an opportunity cost against other things. But we have a lot of confidence in the quality of the studio and the quality of the title, just not in the scale of the opportunity.

GamesIndustry.bizThere's a certain perception of Activision, which you are no doubt working to dispel, of a sort of evil empire corporation which eats up studios for profit. As naive as it might be to expect any large company to look too far beyond making money, do you ever encounter any resistance from studios which you're trying to bring on board?

Dan Winters

I hope not. I would like to think that we spend a lot of time, and I individually spend a lot of time thinking of ways to reach out to the development community and show that we have respect and complete admiration for what they do on a daily basis. I hope that there aren't any hard feelings and I hope there isn't any reluctance - I've certainly not felt it directly.

A business is a tough thing to manage on a number of different fronts, especially when you're dealing with a creative community like video games or interactive entertainment. Any time that I do hear anything of concern I do try to dispel it. The overall message that I would love people to get out of any time they actually get detailed information about us or my personal approach is that we have admiration and respect for the talent in this industry.

We recognise that the success we've had as a company comes from the talent of those individuals and those teams. We would like to think that we're able to compliment that talent and high-quality product with the ability to move things through the right channels, and that's great, I think that's part of our magic sauce. But without really high quality product, and without the passion and talent behind it, we recognise that the business is only the business. I hope there's no reluctance, I certainly haven't felt it directly.