Activison has a sadly ironic story now. This company was formed in 1979 by angry employees of Atari who were fed up with the poor treatment they got from their employers and the poor treatment that was given to customers and they became the first 3rd-party developer/publisher in the industry. They made classics such as Pitfall, Grand Prix, KaBoom, River Raid, Seaquest, and many others.
However over the past few years, under notorious dickface Bobby Kotick, they have become exactly what they were originally formed to combat. That trend has just continued with two recent developments.
First is the attempt to shut down Bizarre Creations. Due to not finding a buyer for the company they have made plans to close its doors putting many people out of work. Okay, I understand that in business things don't always go well. Sometimes company doors do need to be shut.
The problem however, is with how they were treated BEFORE this. Bizarre was notable for its racing primarily the Project Gotham series and the recent Blur. So what did Activision do? They dumped James Bond 007: Blood Stone on them, expecting them to work in a genre that they had absolutely no experience, despite the fact that there plenty of other companies that DO have experience with that kind of genre under there arms.
What this resulted in was a very average third-person shooter, which Activision refused to market because it was not a Call of Duty title or a Guitar Hero title. Again, I get it. They want to push their two big franchises out there, because they are the big money makers, and that's totally understandable. But they are doing it at the total expense of developers with many workers under it. I know many people have talked about this but honestly I'm sick of it.
But that's not the worst. The second story has to do with how they treated their customers through...CUSTOMER SERVICE! SERVICE is the key word.
When one person called in complaining about the servers on Call of Duty: Black Ops on the PS3, he was told by the customer service agent that due to the number of complaints Activision received from PS3 owners, they were considering a "viable" option. Find the problem and fix it? Work with the customers to find a nice a solution? No, disconnecting the PS3 servers completely.
This is unacceptable Activision. There are many companies, developer and/or publisher that I could call into and expect great customer service given their past association with fans. Normally I'd pass this guy off as a jerk and a one time incident, but seeing how you guys have been conducting business over the past few years, I'm not going to do that.
As I said, making money is fine, and sometimes difficult decisions need to be made and people are bound to lose their jobs. It happens. But you guys should be doing everything you can to make sure it doesn't happen. When you give a genre to developer with no experience in said genre and then refuse to market the game, it shows that you don't give a flying shit what happens to your developer and employees. When you treat the customers like this and refuse to help them figure out the problem and fix it, it shows that you don't give a flying shit about the customer: in other words YOUR LIFE BLOOD!
Get yourself together Activision or it's going to bite you in the ass someday, the exact same way it bit Atari in the ass in 1982-83.
No comments:
Post a Comment