Bobby Kotick thinks this Warcraft movie is a “terrible idea” for Blizzard and ultimately one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
Bobby Kotick, former CEO of Activision Blizzard, recently made a appearance on the Girt Podcast, discussing his career in various elements of video games and publisher history. Kotick once discussed Blizzard, especially as he considered the biggest problem in World of Warcraft: making a movie, burning Chris Metzen, and trying to replace it with Titan.
In 2016, the World of Warcraft movie released a release called Simply Warcraft, and the consensus is that it’s not great: The movie has a 29% rating on rotten tomatoes. The film had a box office of $439 million, with a production budget of $160 million, so it wasn’t a disaster, but it’s hard to say it added a lot to Blizzard’s flagship series. Kotick just thought it was a “bad idea” and it was a major factor in the departure of veteran Chris Metzen in 2016.
Kotick said the Warcraft Movie deal was signed before Activision merged with Blizzard, and he soon felt that it was a major shift in the studio that should focus on the game.
“It took a lot of resources and distracted them,” Kotick said. “You think about all these people who make a living, and now they have the opportunity to make movies, they are helping the actors, they are on the scene, this Just a huge distraction. Our expansion was late, the patch wasn’t done on time, and… the movie was awful, and it was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.”
Tell us what you really think! “I think Metzen is very personal and leaves without wanting to work,” Kotick said. “I called him a few years ago and begged him… Please come back. He’s seen two expansion plans and he calls Me, saying they are not good to me, he is the heart of the company.”
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Metzen returned to Blizzard in 2022, a move that is usually popular with Warcraft fans, and his return seems to be entering a period of good physical fitness, regular updates and expansions with the game, making people excited again. Obviously, this can’t be all attributed to one person’s influence on his fingerprints everywhere, it’s great, the next one will be great. ”
From Kotick’s point of view, this is the work done because “I’m going to tell Chris Metzen about game design?”
Kotick went on to briefly discuss another blizzard failure at the time, and the studio somehow managed to achieve great success. “They owned a big project and they spent $80 million, Titan,” Kotick said. “This ambitious.
That’s exactly what Blizzard did afterward: The studio is obviously now focusing on and serving the existing WOW PlayerBase with lasers. But at the time, Titan took the resources away from WOW, and there was a major problem: “They realized that the Titans weren’t going to be a game.”
Kotick continues: “Mike [Ybarra] Chris canceled [Metzen] Jeff Kaplan and some others went to him and said, “We have a good idea from the ashes of Titans, and we really want to do that.” It’s Overwatch. ”
Even now, it’s obvious that things about the game blow away Kotick, who is eager to get honors for achieving that. “They attended our three-year program meeting and all I saw was the artwork, and I didn’t even see the prototype of the game,” Kotick recalls. “For me, it was like, I couldn’t even believe it It’s from a snowstorm. Because the blizzard aesthetic is dark and very different. It’s the most promising, colorful, Pixar-like universe. It’s incredible that this is what we do.”
When asked if Blizzard would do this without him, it suddenly reminds you of the man who once waved a huge force in the industry: “They can’t do it, I had to sign it.”
Executives have achieved huge successful careers in video games, but have left a radical blizzard in the cloud in 2023. Sometimes, Kotick seems almost a pantomime villain in the gaming industry, the miniature of Cutthroat Capitalist is for profit rather than artistic profits, and is willing to announce things like “the goal is to get all the fun from making video games.”
The final start was the 2021 civil rights lawsuit filed in California: followed by an employee strike, and many calls for Kotick to resign, which may even sparked the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft’s Megabucks Megabucks. Given their denials and failures, some will find the internal failure of the action blizzard fading away, so some may find Kotick pronunciating casually in the internal failures of the company.
But there is another side of Kotick’s career, and some shareholders mourn his departure: his merger with Blizzard and the final $68.7 billion sales. Kotick may not care about the art of making games: but he knows the business undeniably.
The full interview lasted over two hours and saw Kotick enter all areas of Activision Blizzard history. For one thing, World of Warcraft feels like it’s in the Golden Age (don’t mention Overwatch), and these days it’s even willing to slap the cheeky on its competitors. In news that will make a former executive very happy, of course it looks like the Warcraft movie will receive a sequel.
