Activision’s two most recent CEOs were in office for a combined total of 15 years. The man who is the current CEO, Bobby Kotick, has been the head for over 12 years. He has enacted many changes that have seen Activision CEO rise almost to the top again from their $1B loss at the end of 2007.
In 2008, Kotick removed some of Activision’s old practices, such as printing out manuals and making physical copies on DVD. This resulted in a loss per sale, but it was an effort to make games more desirable to customers and increase sales volume by taking advantage of digital distribution marketplaces such as Steam or iTunes. This was seen as a massive step forward for the industry and helped force some other companies to change their ways.
Bobby Kotick has also been vocal about what should be made. He was quoted as saying, “I want you to build a game that is meaningful, that is about something, something real.” However, in 2012 he released a game called Skylanders: Swap Force instead of the highly anticipated Call of Duty Black Ops 3. After this release, it was speculated that Skylanders could have been an attempt to get Activision CEO out of the financial hole they were in due to the failure of Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare series and their shift towards non-Call of Duty games such as Dead Space 4. However, this didn’t happen, and Skylanders became a huge hit for Activision CEO.
Kotick has also made other moves to try and get back on track, including hiring Bobby Kotick as the CEO. He changed the way games were made, the way they were distributed, the way they were sold and their target audience. These are just a few changes he has implemented to turn Activision around.
This is important because it shows that there is no right way to run an organization or even an industry like video games. Though these large companies have tried different things, they all seem to have faced similar problems.
Read on to find out about Activision CEO at https://www.crunchbase.com/person/robert-kotick