Kotick describes Activision bonus payments

Activision boss Bobby Kotick has talked up the importance of innovative behaviour at the publisher and revealed how studios can reap the rewards if their game is a success.

Asked by Forbes if a company-wide initiative to reward innovative behaviour existed at Activision, Kotick said: “Yes, because ultimately everybody directly participates in the P&L’s of the games that they’re responsible for, in a big way.

“So if you create a great game like Modern Warfare 3, which is coming out this fall, or Call of Duty: Black Ops, the entire team will make tens and tens of millions of dollars. And then the head of the studio that made the game gets to determine how to allocate the rewards – there’s a big pool that comes to them, and they allocate to the rest of the team members. One of the criteria that they’re going to use to make those allocation determinations is who came up with a great new idea.”

Kotick also revealed that he, as CEO, has a separate few million dollar fund which can be dished out to reward a really great idea.

Asked to describe a situation when this extra bonus fund had been used, Kotick said: “There’s a lot of them I can’t share because the products haven’t come out… but I can give you an example.

“I was taking a tour of one of the studios, and they had just moved into a new building, and there was a group of five people in a pod. In this case they were doing cinematics, and cinematics is a very visual part of what we do. I went into their little cube area, and said, ‘What are you guys working on?’, and they showed me what they were doing on a little 18-inch monitor.

“And they had their cubes – everybody gets to decorate their environments however they choose – and their cube was set up with a fake fireplace that had a little gas fire, and had a couch and a coffee table, and I was sitting there and I said, ‘You’re really missing the big screen TV, it would go well with the décor, but also to show people cinematics, you really want a big screen TV.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we haven’t gotten to that yet.’ So the next day I sent over a big 65-inch flat panel TV.

“Even though we can do the spot bonuses for innovation, those kinds of things sometimes have more of an impact on people than a reward for a specific technology.”

In the same interview Kotick described how Activision abandoned the innovation required to keep the Guitar Hero franchise at the top.