| zarx said: Vivendi are refocusing on other businesses and shedding all their entertainment businesses from the looks of things. They sold their stake in NBC Universal last year and brought another cellular carrier. It's got nothing to do with the long term viability of ActiBliz which is a tiny part of Vivendi. Also I take it you are ignoring the fact that Activision has always brought their franchises in the past from Neversoft with Tony Hawk, to Harmonix with Guitar Hero, to Call of Duty. Plus they have Skylanders now which is huge. It remains to be seen if Kotick is bad for the company and since gamers have been saying he (and CoD) is going to lead them to ruin for years now and the company has only got bigger I doubt investors will want to get rid of him, not until he crashes and burns (if he ever does). Oh and he and his business partner Brian Kelly also owns a large stake in the company. |
Vivendi may be refocusing on "other businesses", but one has to ask why. It's not enough to just say "Vivendi are getting rid of entertainment subsidiaries, so bye Activision" - you have to provide a reason for them to actually get rid of entertainment subsidiaries.
A much more likely scenario is that they're getting rid of subsidiaries that they don't think will make them significant profit in the future.
And I assume that you mean that they have always bought their franchises (please clarify if you meant something else). As for Skylanders, the game series is nowhere near as big as you seem to think. CoD sells over 25 million a year. Skylanders has sold less than 3 million across all platforms, with the majority being on Wii. It does not, at this point, show any signs of getting bigger. If it were up around 5-6 million, then maybe there'd be reason to expect it to become big. To make matters worse, they're already starting to milk it - within about 3 months of the first game releasing, they announced the sequel. They've also got a web game in development, they've released an illustrated novel, and they've openly spoken about the idea of TV shows and movies. Meanwhile, they're mostly big as a toy series, rather than a game series.
As for owning a large stake in the company, I don't see its relevance. If you're suggesting that it's why he'll be kept on (or should be), I'll point out that owning a large stake doesn't provide any protection from being fired for mismanagement. If you're suggesting that it gives him motivation to keep its stock price going up, I'll point out that he'd be happy to ride it up as quickly as he can, and then sell when he expects it to downturn.
