One of my pet peeves as a reviewer was seeing something I said taken out of context. People would often break off a shard of my main point and try to stab me with it. Drove me nuts.
No doubt you’ve caught the spicy headline quote from Bobby Kotick on several news outlets. It comes from an interview in this month’s issue of Game Informer. Strong words for sure. But I think they’re even stronger if you read them in the original context, because it means something completely different when you do.
GI has not posted the full interview online, because they quite understandably want you to pick up the issue for yourself to read the thing yourself. That’s fine, and you should. But here’s exactly what was run in the magazine before and after that soundbite:
On learning from Blizzard about having a commitment to quality:
I’ll tell you, the thing that was an interesting experience for me was three years ago going through the management presentations with Blizzard. We’d do our presentation, they’d do their presentations. We have a lot of properties, so we had people that were coming in and saying, on a kid’s game for example, “Well, we’re talking a 75- or 80-rated game and it’s going to be X, Y, and Z.” Mike Morhaime, Paul Sams, and Rob Pardo were like “Why would you ever target an 80-rated game?” The producers said, “Well it’s a kid’s game, you don’t get the best ratings on a kid’s game because reviewers aren’t going to review them as favorably, so if you look at them objectively an 80 is actually a good rating for a kid’s game or movie game.” That was the other one — movie games were supposed to be an 80.
I remember walking out of the meeting saying, “Why would we make an 80-rated game?” [Laughs] Even adjusting for genre. Our guys would tell you, “Well, it’s the adjustment for a Metacritic rating that they are automatically going to be a lower rating.” But I was thinking that when we did the great Spider-Man PlayStation game, we got a 95 rating. You can make a great game. Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years. They are bad games. They were poorly rated because they were bad games. We went away from what is Spider-Man. It’s about web-slinging. If you don’t do web-slinging right, what is the fantasy of Spider-Man? But I think that was one of those wake-up calls. Even if you’ve been doing this a long time, you walk out saying “That’s a good question.” [Laughs]
Okay, so, the quote is undeniably, irresistibly juicy — I understand the power of a sexy headline (I’m using it myself). But is that the real story from this interview? To me, it’s Bobby Kotick saying, fairly bluntly, “we’re learning from Blizzard’s success, and we can be doing a better job, so let’s raise the bar.” Higher standards, better games — isn’t that exactly what gamers want?
Right before the publicly reported quote, he talks about raising the quality expectations internally; right after the quote, he calls it a “wake-up call” and notes the changed perspective. To me, that’s the story.
