Raising my strongest flame shield and reminding everyone that I still think Kotick is a measly worm of man who needs to get the hell away from gaming before he sucks it dry I will say this for him:
Gaming is a business, and Kotick is treating it like a business. I'm not saying Shafer doesn't have a very good point, and it would certainly be nice if all developers thought of the gamers they were supplying the product for, but it is still an industry, and by all accounts Kotick is pretty good at that industry.
Yes he's a prick, yes he doesn't appear to have much of a conscience beneath the layers of profteering that make up his soul, but which would you rather, he ran Activision like a business and it continued to make money and games, or he ran Activision like his own personal idea factory and it soon went bankrupt and we never had anything more from them; thus creating the knock-on effect that many other smaller companies would go under as well, and potentially a lot of investors into videogames would abandon ship?
Personally I'd rather we put up with the devil himself as long as he manages to keep some semblance of life going, then boot him at the first sign of trouble.
