Blizzard's Rob Pardo

You'd have to talk Chris, I've talked to him a little bit, but I can tell you what I think it was. I don't think it's so much reminding Blizzard, because one of our core corporate values is to actually embrace your inner geek. It's something we really encourage people internally at Blizzard to have. The things Chris put up there are things he's very passionate about. We have people that might be really into technology or iPhones or the iPad, or geeky music, or poker and it's really tapping into that passion. That's one of our core company values. What I think Chris was trying to do to the Blizzard community is make sure the Blizzard community understands that we're all geeks. It's not like there's Blizzard employees and Blizzard fans. We're all excited about this stuff for a reason. He was just trying to make sure that it's clear that we're all the same.

Well, the thing that I think a lot of people may not remember is that we've had a long history of this. This is not the first company that we've merged with or whatever else. Ever since Davidson & Associates bought Blizzard 14-ish years ago it's been a full-owned entity. And despite that fact Blizzard has grown as it's own brand and its own identity separate from whatever corporate structure we're part of. At this point more than ever it's really clear. At BlizzCon there's not Activision games down on the show floor. We really like the fact that we're with Activision because they're a really strong, healthy company which is something we've not always had the experience of being attached to. They are still their own thing and we're still our own thing and we're not going to change that identity for anybody.

We don't necessarily have a problem, it all depends on the level of help. We're not going to send programmers anywhere but that said we're pretty open with sharing ideas and thoughts and challenges, and not even within Activision. Most people would be surprised at how open the games industry is among a lot of developers, how much we do share thoughts and challenges because it makes everyone's games better, it makes the industry better and allows each company to be better. We're not competing against Bungie, we're not competing against Valve. We're all trying to make this the best entertainment medium there is.

As far as sharing within Activision, sure, if any of their studios call up and say "we're having this challenge that you guys have had, how do we solve that?" then we'd do that. Where we'd probably draw the line is actually resources. We're not going to go and design something for them or program something for them because we have to stay focused on our stuff. And that's why we're successful, because we really focus on our own games.