Tom Goldman said:
Fair enough, I'm just wondering what the true difference really is between EA and Activision, and if it's even possible to find that out. Kotick saying "EA sux" is really the only statement he's ever made that makes me wonder if he knows what he's talking about or not. I seriously doubt there's that big of a difference overall between the two companies, but I don't work for either one, so I don't have much to go on there.
Yeah, on the financial side they're the same--shareholders who may know bugger-all about video games, but deal in cold, hard numbers and expect a reasonable return on their investments. The difference in the "head office" is minimal, if any. This is because they want the same result--all of your money.
The difference on the "factory floor" is probably quite a bit more, but we don't hear from the developers themselves often. Instead, we hear from Kotick... who flails about as a makeshift "middle man" between the two. I think, in this case, that I get what he was trying to say (between letting studios keep their identity, but also making them earn new IPs), and I can fully agree he sucks at saying it.
It's also a healthy heap of smack-talk, which seems to be the new advertising currency in the video game world. This is, of course, the logical result of what happens when a generation of hardcore smacktalking gamers BECOME the next generation of game developers and execs.
