Activision CEO Kotick is bullish on 'Call of Duty'
— -- Top game publisher Activision Blizzard reasserts its dominance at midnight Monday with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, expected to be the top-selling game of the year. Analysts give the first-person military shooting game a shot at being the biggest Call of Duty game ever.
That's saying a lot since last year's Call of Duty: Black Ops replaced 2009's Modern Warfare 2 as the best-selling game of all time, topping 25 million sold, or more than $1.5 billion.
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick talked with USA TODAY's Mike Snider about Call of Duty and other happenings in the industry. Edited for clarity.
Q: Can this game continue the record-setting pace?
A: We are hopeful. It seems like this will be an incredibly successful launch. Pre-orders are well, well ahead of Black Ops.
Q: Does that surprise you?
A: No. Core to our strategy is making sure that we are very engaged with our audience and that the content we are delivering — whether it is downloadable content or new features and functions like those in new online service Call of Duty Elite — is really representative of the tastes and interests of the audience.
Q: Yet competing publishers have tried to cut intoCall of Duty's market leadership.
A: It develops healthy competition and it keeps us sharp. When you see people doing innovative or interesting things with other games, any type of action game, it definitely raises the bar.
Q:Call of Dutyisn't just about video games. What led to your creation of the non-profit Call of Duty Endowment to help veterans with job training and placement?
A: Former Veterans Affairs secretary Jim Nicholson started giving me the statistics, and I was flabbergasted: So you go serve your country, make all those sacrifices and you come back and you are three times less likely to get a job than the average citizen. It was unconscionable.
A lot of our Call of Duty players are former military, and the game is a great distraction for the folks in active service. This is something that was a natural for us, and the more we delved into it the more we felt we could make a difference.
Q: Outwardly, it seems that Activision's competition is more publicly embracing online social games. Is that a fair observation?
A: If you (go) back to the 1980s, this company has supported every significant gaming platform that ever existed. If you look at Facebook … and mobile as a platform, and we do, we think there are tremendous opportunities. We have had very good success with Call of Duty: Zombies, Crash Bandicoot and Guitar Hero on iPhone. They also provided our investors with a significant financial return.
New game Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure is the first interactive entertainment experience that can legitimately be played across platforms. I really like our strategy for next-generation platforms, not just for Facebook and mobile.
Q: What trends do you see happening in the online space?
A: I think search is going to evolve a great deal. I would be surprised in 10 years if the way we search was in a box. There is a lot of capital being put into new ways to search visually and with natural language.
Q: How will video games evolve?
The production values of our games are going to get elevated to feature film and television quality. One of the big impediments to really effective storytelling has been the inability to have characters whose facial animations, mouth movements and dialogue delivery look realistic. We will deliver that in the next few years.
