Speaking to Forbes, Activision-Blizzard Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick said that the main reason behind their success is giving their employees the freedom to be creative and to fail.
"I don't want to say celebrate the failures, but in a lot of respects it's sort of that," he explained. "We have what we call the post mortem process, really evaluating what is it that caused an outcome not to be aligned to the original expectation. And sometimes it's not even like an abject failure, if the game just doesn't sell, sometimes it's a game that doesn't sell as well as you would have expected, or in some cases more importantly, if it doesn't feel like it meets the expectations of the audience."
Kotick then cited Guitar Hero as an example. He admitted that the game suffocated due to lack of innovation in its successive sequels and that the attempt to introduce variety by releasing the DJ Hero spinoff was fundamentally wrong.
"We didn't really take the time that we usually take to understand audience behavior," he admitted. "It was one of those things where we were resting on the idea that one of the essential fantasies of video games is to unleash your inner rock star. And it didn't really matter how you did that, but as long as you were allowing people to unleash their inner rock star fantasies, you'd continue to be successful. So we went off on a passion project that had a point of differentiation -which is called DJ Hero."
"And in hindsight, if you step back -and it really would have been a simple thing to do- we should have said, 'Well, how many people really want to unleash their inner DJ?' And then out of the people who do want to unleash their inner DJ, how many want to do it in the context of a game where you earn points, versus just taking a DJ deck or tools on their Macintosh and actually being a DJ? And it turns out it's a very small market."
"... So that's what happened with DJ Hero. At the same time we were so excited about going down this new direction with DJ Hero, I think we abandoned a bit of the innovation that was required in the Guitar Hero franchise."
"And so it was the double whammy of DJ Hero was unsuccessful, and then Guitar Hero became unsuccessful because it didn't have any nourishment and care. So we made what I think was exactly the right decision last year. We said you know what, we need to regain our audience interest, and we really need to deliver inspired innovation."
"So we're going to take the products out of the market, and we're not going to tell anybody what we're doing for a while, but we're going to stop selling Guitar Hero altogether. And then we're going to go back to the studios and we're going to use new studios and reinvent Guitar Hero. And so that's what we're doing with it now."
