Autonomy leads to empowerment. We work hard to maintain a balance between collaboration and cooperation and independence.
Bobby Kotick
The social element has really transformed the gaming experience.
Successful business leaders who have helped build institutions of lasting value - all are committed to talent and a culture of excellence. This is usually accomplished by the identification, retention, and development of great people.
In our early days, being recognized on any list of great companies was hard to imagine. There were times when we sold the office furniture to make payroll.
I would have 'Call of Duty' be an online subscription service tomorrow. I think our audiences are clamouring for it.
In the mid 1980s, video games as an industry had lost its way a bit. Atari had collapsed. There was this widespread collective belief that it was because video games were a fad.
Most people play games alone, against the machine. But if you're playing against a real person, it's going to be that much more fun.
I just don't want to pay taxes.
It's very easy to criticize the CEO of the market leader.
The Call of Duty Endowment is a natural philanthropic extension of our brand.
Our troops are home. It's time for American business to replace the yellow ribbons with help wanted signs.
We've always operated under the belief that you could run a video game business as professionally as you could run a consumer packaged goods business, and you wouldn't diminish creativity.
I go to these cocktail parties now, and I say I make video games, and people go, 'Wow.' I can attract crowds.
The engineering, analytics, design, testing, and delivery behind our products offer some of the hardest engineering and business challenges in the world. As we've brought our franchises into eSports and moved to digital delivery, it's become even more complex and exciting - which, in turn, has allowed us attract even more top talent.
I think Steve Wynn, who was like my mentor and a second father, has been a great inspiration. He's a great mentor because he's a guy who's had great business success but also has always been driven by creativity - and inspired creativity.
As business models evolve, as the way you distribute content evolves, as the ability to do things online changes in terms of pricing or trial or sample, I think we've definitely always been out in front of the rest of our competitors.
We have an obligation to provide a return for our shareholders.
What I'm good at is making sure we have the best resources, the best talent, the best marketing, and the best access to distribution.
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.
I'm not really a music person.
Activision Blizzard has always been about inspiring play, competition, and community for our fans and employees, and that hasn't changed.
Looking ahead, we see the popularity of eSports exploding as competitive gaming becomes more mainstream and eSports leagues like 'Call of Duty' World League and Overwatch League driving greater engagement and viewership.
'Guitar Hero' was much more about us not innovating in a way that was appealing to audiences. It's not about oversaturating the market.
One of the reasons the games business has become more popular and more broadly appealing is that it's gone from this very solitary experience to this very social experience.
Being able to evolve great franchises over time is the foundation of world-class entertainment companies.
The video game business is primarily a male-oriented business. And I have three girls. And you see the things that are important to them in their game experiences are the social interaction. They love the ability to chat with their friends. They love the ability to have some connection online with other people.
I think that's the responsibility of the CEO and the CEOs below me: to make sure that we're constantly putting people in places where they have the opportunity to develop into those careers but also having a rewards and recognition system that allows a great programmer to stay as a great programmer.
I think a lot of the time we end up taking people who - and this is sort of a big cultural advantage at Activision - we find people who are, have a graduate degree of some kind - mainly it's in the sciences - and they are in jobs that would never suggest that they were working for anything game related but that they're passionate gamers.
One thing that probably is unique at Activision is that we really spend a lot of time up front with our audiences, and in big quantities and with a very thoughtful process, to really try and draw out from them what it is that they would like to play. So we have a pretty good sense going in what the expectation of the audience is.
Veterans Day is a time to reflect and renew our commitment to ensure our military heroes have the tools to reintegrate successfully back to civilian life.
Our customers need to be satisfied that there is a price-value relationship that they feel great about.
We like people with the potential to be leaders of leaders, not managers of managers.
People have been playing versions of 'World of Warcraft' since 1994, and it's still the world's leading subscription-based MMO.
When you dig down and look at the people who are vocal in their criticism of me, it's a small number.
You find out two executives are planning to break their contracts, keep the money you gave them, and steal 40 employees. What do you do? You fire them.
I like what I'm doing. If I didn't like what I was doing, I'd be doing something else.
If you look at the history of our company, we don't do a lot of acquisition. The reason is, we need to see that people are culturally and philosophically aligned with the way that we approach the business.
Just reskinning games with our intellectual property is not an appealing prospect for opportunity. That isn't something that creates long-term value for shareholders.
Whether they're paying for it or not is not really relevant. They're investing a significant amount of time in our content. At some point, commercial opportunities will materialise for greater percentages of that audience.
When we created Overwatch at Blizzard, it was always with the expectation that we would be able to celebrate and recognize our players in a way that would be consistent with traditional sports.
It's private enterprise that can create jobs and fill them. It's business that can train people and make them productive tax-payers. And it's America Inc. that has the most to gain from tapping this extraordinary human resource.
No matter where people stand on the policies that led to the conflicts, Americans recognize the depth of sacrifice and patriotism of our men and women in uniform. Everyone agrees these heroes deserve every advantage we can give them.
Veterans have the skills employers want - discipline, motivation, leadership, and the ability to work on a team. They have made the U.S. military the most effective and respected in the world.
The most important thing we do to encourage innovation is give people the freedom to fail. And I think you can articulate that and establish that as a value in a lot of different ways. I don't want to say celebrate the failures, but in a lot of respects, it's sort of that.
Mobile gaming is the largest and fastest-growing opportunity for interactive entertainment, and we will have one of the world's most successful mobile game companies and its talented teams providing great content to new customers, in new geographies, throughout the world.
All my life, I've been the rebel in the X-wing fighter, and then one morning, I woke up, and I was on board the Death Star.
If you want to retain your identity and culture, we're a really great mothership. If you want to sell out... there are definitely other companies to talk to.
If it's compelling and engaging enough, customers will consider paying for it. If we don't deliver something that has value, we won't expect value in return.
We want to give our audiences flexibility in the way they're commercially engaged in the content.
Our responsibility is to deliver the most compelling content to our players. and if we do that, the audiences are there.
