http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=265559

Bobby Kotick has dismissed the likes of Valve, Epic, Ninja Theory, Level-5, Insomniac, Foundation 9, Gearbox, Sucker Punch, Rebellion and Terminal Reality - by calling Bungie the "last remaining high quality independent developer" in the world. Yep. Wow.

Activision, of course, has embarked on an exclusive ten-year publishing deal with Bungie for its new 'action universe' - widely assumed to be an MMO.

"Bungie are a very unusual company," Kotick told investors last week. "They're probably the last remaining high quality independent developer. It's very hard to [pauses]... that has sort of has institutional skills and capabilities. And they're a realcompany. 

"When they started the process of looking for a new partner, they'd been in business with Microsoft. They had a vision for a product they wanted to create that needed certain skills and capabilities - that Microsoft had some of. 

"But as they started to go and look at the obvious candidates, they realised that no company other than Activision had the skills that they needed to be successful for the vision of that product. These are things that you never would have envisioned five years ago.

"Blizzard had 2,500 people in customer service and support just for World Of Warcraft. How you train them, how you manage them, how you organise them... how you use CRM tools in delighting and satisfying the expectations of your audiences.. it's something no other company [Bungie] talked to [could offer]."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How the fuck does this guy even have permission to speak? How can he say something that stupid?!

Sounds like a self-serving proclamation to me.

And if you are their publisher, they are not so indepedent.

Mike from Morgantown

I'm sure if he just signed a 10 deal contract with Valve it'd be a different story.

Such an awful guy.

Of course it's self-serving, but anyone who knows something about the industry and how it works will know that Bungie are by far not the only independant developers left who produce high quality games. If I were an investor, Bobby would lose a lot of credit saying something like that.

And they're still an independant developer, even if they have a deal with Activision.

and this is a reason why I refuse to buy Activision games.

You should just buy them 2nd hand, same end result for Activision as not buying it, no point in losing out yourself.

Not that there are any decent Activision games this gen anyway ...IMO

I don't mind him calling other devs bad, that's pretty much exactly what I expect to hear from him. However, Bungie chose them because they're so good? That's a pretty bad joke.

Wait, is it really a joke? There must be a reason why Bungie chose Activision instead of some other company. And surely Bungie knew about Activision's bad reputation among gamers, too.

he's cute! really.

valve still hasn't made episode 3 yet!... maybe kotick's on to something

jk

best chance for $$$ most likely

LoL, Kotick is hilarious. He should have become a clown, seriously.