Bobby Kotick has been very outspoken about the Xbox Live service while speaking to FT recently. He mentioned how he is not too happy with the Xbox Live income model, speaking specifically on the Call of Duty online content available on the service. His apparent concern is that games need more of a chance to earn revenue for the publishers, as Microsoft seem to eat up the majority of the income stream. Kotick said the following on the issue.
“We’ve heard that 60 percent of [Microsoft’s] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call Of Duty,” said Kotick. “We don’t really participate financially in that income stream. We would really like to be able to provide much more value to those millions of players playing on Live, but it’s not our network.
We have always been platform agnostic,” he said. “[Consoles] do a very good job of supporting the gamer. If we are going to broaden our audiences, we are going to need to have other devices.”
Not a good look when the providers of the most played game on Xbox Live are unhappy with the service. In Microsoft’s defense Activision have proven to be very money hungry the past few years, so you can clearly see why they would be unhappy about the lack of revenue they have received from Xbox Live. One statement I found interesting coming from Kotick was “We would really like to be able to provide much more value to those millions of players playing on Live, but it’s not our network.” To me it seems like he is subliminally threatening to ease off on the amount of content they provide if they continue to be uncompensated to their own satisfaction. Let us know what you think.
