It used to be the case that we did well during slowdowns because if you couldn't afford to go to the movies or to travel to a theme park, you stayed home and played a computer game. But now I think that the hardware manufacturers are going to have to think about reducing their prices because the cost of purchasing some of this stuff is prohibitive.

I dunno, as a kid, I kinda always remember video game consoles being expensive. But hey, that's because I was like a little kid and little kids have no money. But I'm an adult now, and it's all relative, Bobby Kotick! Speaking of adults, Bobby also pointed out that the adult geared games are as important to the industry as R-rated movies. That's echoing similar things Kotick stated earlier. This leas us to believe that yes he will probably say the same thing again.

Guitar Hero firm Activision [Times Online via MCVUK]

"We try to stick to violence against small animals," said Kotick, (hopefully) joking, when Swisher asked him about the in-game violence issue:

Most of our users are over 18, they go to R-rated movies and we need to to cater to that preference. We are a broad-based medium today and we must appeal to as many demographics as we can. Part of that demographic audience enjoys in-game violence, and that includes gratuitous violence.

Bobby Kotick, Chairman and CEO of Guitar Hero-Maker Activision - D6 Highlights [All Things Digital]

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick showed Guitar Hero World Tour this morning at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference, marking the game's debut and rocking out with the Journal's Walt Mossberg. Looks like folks at the event had a fun time with the full set!

And, bonus - following the jump, a new video showing off the upcoming game's drum set. If you can't play Guitar Hero on a stage with Activision's CEO, watching this is probably the best you can do right now.

D6 Highlights [All Things Digital]

The video-game market fundamentals have never been stronger. There's no evidence that this growth will slow... A lot of this growth is coming from consumers who are experiencing video games for the first time.

On his Level Up blog, Newsweek's N'Gai Croal decided to go right to EA's Jeff Brown and see what the company had to say in its own defense. The logo you see here is Level Up's own design for the EA Empire — think they should adopt it officially?

In a recent Q&A with Portfolio, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick had the following exchange with the interviewer:

Is there a key to Activision's growth?

It's about really being considerate of the culture in the game studios that Activision buys. That's the biggest difference between us and any of our competitors. We built a model that celebrates entrepreneurial, opportunistic, independent values. It's almost the opposite of Electronic Arts, which has commoditized development. It did a very good job of taking the soul out of a lot of the studios it acquired.

What was the reaction of the executives at Electronic Arts when they read that quote?

The truth is, everyone laughed. In the past year EA has made radical changes to decentralize the company and put creative control back in the hands of development teams. It's too early to declare victory but if you talk to people like Patrick Soderlund at dice in Stockholm, Mark Jacobs at Mythic in Virginia or Josh Resnick at Pandemic—they'll probably tell you that it's working. They get a lot of resources and creative freedom. That freedom has already contributed new start-ups like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge and Boom Blox and there's a lot of others to be announced soon.

With the rising costs of fuel and food and housing, it is more difficult to go out and buy a $399 console, and I think it's going to put pressure on the console manufacturers to reduce their prices.

Kotick is a regular ol' quote machine! Opinions? He's got 'em.
Game Console Prices May Be Cut [Reuters]

Do What You Want - OK Go
All The Small Things - Blink 182
Spiderwebs - No Doubt
Are You Gona Be My Girl - Jet
We're Not Gonna Take It - Twisted Sister
All Star - Smash Mouth
Breed - Nirvana
Jessie's Girl - Rick Springfield
Hit Me With Your Best Shot - Pat Benatar
This Love - Maroon 5
Heaven - Los Lonely Boys
Helicopter - Bloc Party
China Grove - The Doobie Brothers
Rock and Roll All Nite - KISS (cover by Line 6)
What I Want - Daughtry

Maroon 5? Laugh out loud.
On Tour [Pocket Gamer]

Kotick says the soul-harvesting machine doesn't fly at Activision, which has "built a model that celebrates entrepreneurial, opportunistic, independent values" and a new Tony Hawk game every fucking year. And they have free bagels on Mondays!

Game Boy [Portfolio via Develop]

We have no plans to have in-game advertising in StarCraft II. We believe Bobby was actually referring to Battle.net, which has always included ads.

Kotick claims that, shortly after the game's release, "every single artist" who appears in Guitar Hero III saw their featured tracks become their most-downloaded on iTunes. Which is making the artist money. And every time a kid boots up the game and is introduced to an artist like Aerosmith or Van Halen for the first time, that's more money an artist - and their label - will make.

Which has Activision in a unique position. Kotick says that if artists and labels are making money off Guitar Hero, they want to be making money off the artists and labels, in terms of both straight profits and in things like advertising and marketing presence (presumably on tours, via endorsements, etc). And if Universal (yes, he mentions their new labelmates by name) don't cough up, well, they'll just go and find another label who will.

Looks like somebody's got his swagger on.

As far as Europe's concerned, it's a simple approach. The first step is getting enough product on the market, which they're already doing: Kotick says that while North America was the focus in 2007 as far as shipping allocations and marketing went, in 2008 they'd be focusing on Europe. The second step was in securing more local content: Activision's "relationship" with Universal music has given the company access to a huge roster of European acts, not only for the primary markets of Britain, France and Germany, but also bands that will let them target other areas, such as Spain and Italy.

Sounds familiar, I know, and probably not enough to win out over Rock Band's charms. Then again, so long as Rock Band remains a ghost on European release schedules, that's a moot point: Europeans can play Guitar Hero III, right now. They can't play Rock Band, and don't know when (or even if) they'll be able to play Rock Band.

As for Asia (Kotick only specifically addresses China and Korea), well, things are a little more ambitious. Citing experience they've already picked up from Blizzard - one of the few Western devs to crack the Asian market - Kotick says that future success in the region will rest not on boxed products like it does in the West, but in getting the game into internet cafes.

There are, Kotick says, 300,000 of them just in China. They're trusted local institutions. They have credit and billing structures already in place, and are a place where people meet, hook up and hang out. Using the PC version of GHIII as an example, all they'd need to do would be to hook a USB guitar into a PC, flood the game with local content (again, thanks to their new relationship with Universal), set up organised competitions and ladders and watch the cash money come flooding in.

"It's an incredibly natural way to think about Guitar Hero in a market like China", said Kotick, who also stated that such a move would be entirely on a pre-paid basis, and that they could have "multiple instruments in the same room". Funny. He could have just said "guitars", but no, he said "instruments". Multiple instruments.

The Activision CEO says that during the first few months of integration planning with Vivendi, they asked themselves some serious questions about what they consider "the fastest growing markets in the world", including Asian markets and MMOs.

As an example, Kotick said to investors at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, "What would be the natural evolution of a property like Call of Duty into a massively-multiplayer environment and how do you monetize that?"

Kotick parlayed that into a thought on in-game advertising, in which he pointed to Starcraft as a model for short-session, ladder tournament play that can easily support ad spots. While a Call of Duty MMO may be a long way off, if it ever gets off the ground, it's starting to sound like Activision execs may be giving it serious thought and we'd expect it to be a big focus for the publisher's ad revenue model.

Early in the Q&A session, Kotick talked about opportunities for new platforms and "line extensions" for the Guitar Hero franchise, which we can theorize mean things like Guitar Hero: On Tour for portables and DJ Hero. Kotick also talked about bands that were "proprietary to our format," including Aerosmith.

Kotick later talked about Aerosmith again, in response to a line of questioning about artists finding themselves making big bucks off Guitar Hero tracks. He said of the opportunity, "If we're [...] creating a whole new group of consumers, six to eleven year old consumers, who are being exposed to Aerosmith for the first time or Van Halen for the first time, whatever that might be we need to capture much more of that upside opportunity."

Now, Kotick may just be a big fan of Eddie Van Halen, but the profits to be had selling a licensed Kramer 5150 Guitar Hero guitar controller may have just gotten Bobby a bit too excited. Based on what the Activision CEO said, expect more artist-only titles, and consider Van Halen a fairly safe bet.

"We don't think that even if we made the USD 500 million or billion-dollar investment to get a product out [to compete with WOW] that we would even be successful doing it," he said.

$1 billion investment needed to take on World of Warcraft - Kotick [GamesIndustry.biz]

Sure, go ahead and laugh at the mentally unstable man! I have a sneaking suspicion that he might be right about this one. Kotick will be vindicated, you'll see. It's just crazy enough to work, I say.

Activision CEO: $199 for consoles critical [Reuters]

The few hundred people left at the company referred to it as Lackovision and I think they suffered a lot from that, combined with a challenging industry at the time.

Game player with a serious goal [via nextgen]