Bobby Kotick, perhaps the gaming industries most hated personal, has stated that Bungie are the “last remaining high quality independent developer”.
The claim might just come from the fact that Activision bought Bungine in a ten year deal, but here is what he has to say:
“Bungie are a very unusual company,” said Kotick during the Comms and Entertainment conference.
“They’re probably the last remaining high quality independent developer. It’s very hard to [pauses]… that has sort of has institutional skills and capabilities. And they’re a real company. ”
“When they started the process of looking for a new partner, they’d been in business with Microsoft. They had a vision for a product they wanted to create that needed certain skills and capabilities – that Microsoft had some of. ”
“But as they started to go and look at the obvious candidates, they realised that no company other than Activision had the skills that they needed to be successful for the vision of that product. These are things that you never would have envisioned five years ago.” he said.
“Blizzard had 2,500 people in customer service and support just for World Of Warcraft. How you train them, how you manage them, how you organise them… how you use CRM tools in delighting and satisfying the expectations of your audiences.. it’s something no other company [Bungie] talked to [could offer].”