Activision: Blizzard working on new IP

Posted by Kevin in News | 1 comment

Aug 06, 10

We’ve posted about the Activision earnings call a lot today but more news keeps trickling out. Now it’s Blizzard’s turn. Activision’s answer to Darth Vader, CEO Bobby Kotick, jumped in to talk about Bungie and Blizzard. Interestingly, he outlined Blizzard spending huge money on a new IP.

Speculation of such a thing came about originally around 2006/7 when Starcraft II was teased. But since then, all the talk has been about WoW expansions and of course, the newly released StarCraft II.

“Remember, we have two enormous investments,” said Kotick. “One in Bungie and the other in another project at Blizzard that we haven’t given a lot of visibility to. Those are going to be entirely new intellectual properties. But with the recognition that the way to build them is take long amounts of time, lots of capable talent, an enormous amount of capital and you have to have a real roadmap for innovation and creativity. And I think that those are going to be two very good examples from the ground up original ideas.”

Basically, a huge amount of money is being spent on two new IP’s which could save Activision from having to re-think its strategy about the waning Call of Duty franchise (now without the original team behind it and with increasing competition from EA’s Medal of Honour).