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Activision Publishing boss Eric Hirshberg believes that the company has done an exceptional job at maintaining interest in the Call of Duty series “long after all the sceptics thought it would start to falter”.
Discussing the success of Skylanders and Call of Duty with Game Informer, Hirshberg admitted that the original Skylanders “was a big risk, we focused on it, we brought all the resources we needed to it, we brought the right creative talent in to make it great and it’s paying off.”
And the firm has “done the same thing over the years with Call of Duty, I would argue better than anyone. We’ve kept that going long after all the sceptics thought it would start to falter and yet it still gains momentum, it still gains in size and engagement.”
Hirshberg believes that the key to Call of Duty’s ongoing success is committing “a lot of… resources and time and capital” to its development, and focussing its teams on just “doing a few things exceptionally well.”
And it’s a similar story with Destiny, which Hirshberg is confident will perform well when it hits the market next year.
“We’re a company that makes a few bets and when we go we go big,” he continues. “I think that that focused strategy is something that really pays off because it’s really hard to make compelling content of this nature that’s this deep and this vast, and I like that everybody’s focussed on doing a few things exceptionally well and getting them right.
“Obviously it starts with creative talent with our development studios, they know how to make great games, but it involves a lot of good work by a lot of different people from a lot of different disciplines to make these things catch fire. Did we sit down and know ahead of time how successful they would all be? No, of course, sometimes it even exceeds your own expectations, but we had confidence they were all winning ideas.”
Despite Call of Duty’s growth in recent years, its run may end with this November’s Call of Duty: Ghosts. Last month, Hirshberg warned that pre-orders for Ghosts are “well below” those of last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, blaming the lower numbers on “hesitation amongst past CoD pre-orderers… primarily due to not knowing which platform they’ll be playing on”.
The game launches on current-gen consoles and PC on November 5, with Xbox One and PS4 releases following later in the month.
Source: gameinformer.com
