For many months, I have speculated that Activision Blizzard is the gaming industry’s newest evil empire. Back in July, the then newly-merged company revealed that it would not be publishing a number of titles in Vivendi’s portfolio, which included “Ghostbusters: The Video Game” and “Brutal Legend.” Instead, the company opted for established franchises like “Spyro the Dragon” and “Crash Bandicoot.” Fortunately, Atari has officially picked up “Ghostbusters” and “The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.” However, Tim Schafer’s “Brutal Legend” is still without a publisher, and it is rumored that Activision Blizzard is impeding the search.

In the following months, company executives have remained tight-lipped in regards to the dropped titles.  However, at the publisher’s recent Q3 earnings call, CEO Bobby Kotick revealed what most gamers probably already knew: Activision Blizzard wants to stay away from financially risky games.

Essentially, the industry’s largest third-party publisher wants to make piles of cash off of its established franchises by exploiting the living bejesus out of them. Thus, games like “Brutal Legend,” which “don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform,” were dropped by the company.

According to Gamasutra, which was present for the call, Kotick stated:

So, while there are lots of promise for a lot of these products that we had in the portfolio, I think, generally, our strategy has been to focus — especially given the increase in development expenditures on the products that have those attributes and characteristics that we know if we release today, we’ll be working on 10 years from now.

He went on to say that companies should still pursue fresh ideas, but need to be judicious.

You still need to have production of new original intellectual property, but you need to do it very, very selectively. And if you look at the number of new original intellectual properties successfully launched in the market each year over the last five or ten years, it’s a small, single-digit number.

A single-digit number? That seems like a ridiculously low estimate, especially since games like “Dead Space,” “Rock Band,” “LittleBigPlanet,” “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune,” “Assassin’s Creed” and “Mass Effect” have launched in the past year. “Mirror’s Edge,” another new IP from Electronic Arts, is set to release on Nov. 11.

Jump over to page two for my thoughts.

CONTINUE TO PAGE: 1 2