Bizarre Situations

Want to see proof? Look no further than Activision itself, and the dramatic gap in the performance of various titles in its catalogue in the past months. On one hand, the company has sold millions upon millions of copies of games like Call of Duty: Black Ops and StarCraft II. On the other hand, titles like Tony Hawk: Shred and DJ Hero 2 dramatically under-performed, with the Tony Hawk title in particular raising eyebrows by shifting a paltry 3000 units in its first week on sale in the USA.

Somewhere in the middle, then, is a title like Blur, with its half-million sales. Once, that would have been fine - unremarkable, perhaps not the start of a franchise, but enough to keep the lights on at a studio, especially one with a solid pedigree and strong goodwill behind it. In today's landscape, there's only room for the behemoths. Blur, for all its critical acclaim, joins the ranks of the flops, and Activision's bosses cock an eyebrow at Bizarre Creations and ruminate over whether the studio can ever produce the multi-multi-million sellers which are, apparently, the only things worth having in the market nowadays.

Of course, that's not entirely the right question to ask, because while Bizarre Creations developed Blur, the reality is that any new franchise created by a wholly owned studio of a major publisher is by no means the creation of that studio alone. Building a game franchise within a publisher is a vastly collaborative effort on a whole lot of different levels. From concept approval through to the gold master, the publisher's fingerprints are all over the project, and from that point on, the ball's almost entirely in their court, with marketing and distribution playing a vital role in establishing the franchise and getting early sales moving.

In other words, if Blur didn't perform up to standard, it's as much Activision's fault as it is Bizarre Creations' - probably more so, in fact, given the fact that the critics liked the game and the public seem simply not to have heard of it. Of course, a new franchise - especially in a crowded genre like racing - is a tough thing to launch, and even the most experienced publisher can trip up. On the other hand, Activision right now needs new franchises like a desert needs rain, because if the corpse of the Tony Hawk franchise has stopped twitching and the music game sector isn't going to take much more flogging... Well, take the properties controlled by the fiercely independent Blizzard out of the equation, and Activision ends up looking much like Take-Two did a few years ago, a company with one world-beating franchise which comes along once a year and nothing but drought in between.

Where will new franchises come from? Activision's not much of a company for nurturing new talent. One gets the impression that it feels itself a bit beyond such things, perhaps not so much out of arrogance but out of a wise recognition of how easy it is for a large corporate body like itself to have a Reverse Midas Touch when it comes to creative endeavours. Instead, it's keen on opening its wallet to established franchise creators - like Bungie, on whose first original IP since Halo the publisher has pinned significant hopes.

In the medium term, of course, Activision will be fine. It has Blizzard, after all, a golden egg laying goose which the publisher's top executives are forbidden by restraining order from approaching with sharp objects. It has Call of Duty, another magical goose which has thus far proved remarkably resilient in the face of attempts to cut it open. It just launched a game which took $650 million in its opening week. Nobody's predicting doom for Activision.

But the Activision business model - the model of concentrating its focus to reduce risk and hiking prices to ensure that consumers do much the same - has been pursued blindly by many other publishers who view the firm's turnover with envious eyes, and some of those publishers aren't going to emerge from all of this looking quite so healthy. In a world where consumer spend on boxed games is being laser-focused on hits to the increasing detriment of all the misses, Activision has been left holding a few cards - but some publishers will find themselves holding none at all.

Of course, the wider context is important too - this is all happening at one end of an industry which has grown remarkably in scope to encompass all sorts of less risky, more adventurous and even more creative enterprises, distributed at a whole host of price points on a variety of platforms which didn't even exist five years ago. If many developers and even some publishers are sailing their business away from traditional console titles and into fresher waters, it's not just for the love of shiny new things - it's because they can see what's happening in console gaming, and recognise that it's an increasingly hostile place to try anything new, to take a creative risk, or even to simply survive as anything other than a multinational behemoth.

As to Bizarre Creations, caught in the midst of all of this - we can only cross our fingers and hope that everything turns out well for the studio. Nobody questions its ability to make good games. Sadly, however, this sector of the games business is one where making good games simply isn't enough any more.