Bobby Kotick slags off EA

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has slagged off Electronic Arts - his chief rival.

"EA will buy a developer and then it will become 'EA Florida', 'EA Vancouver', EA New Jersey', whatever," Kotick told the latest issue of Edge magazine.

"We always looked and said, 'You know what? What we like about a developer is that they have a culture, they have an independent vision and that's what makes them so successful.'

"We don't have an Activision anything – it's Treyarch, Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer. That, to me, is one of the unassailable rules of building a publishing company. And in every case except for two, the original founders of the studio are still running the studios today.

"The only thing that we try to do is to provide a support structure to make them more successful. If you do a really god job – and a lot of our studios do – you get to pick what is, in my view, the most difficult thing to pick in the industry: to make original intellectual property."

Kotick is, of course, public enemy number one for most gamers after a year that's seen the CEO make some eyebrow-raising comments and fire COD creators Vince Zampella and Jason West, who went on to form Respawn Entertainment and sign with EA.

Only last week Kotick said Halo developer Bungie, which has signed a ten year deal with Activision, was "probably the last remaining high quality independent developer".

And who can forget the infamous "take all the fun out of making video games" quote from last year?

According to Kotick, though, EA's the big bad wolf.

"I've been an oppressed EA developer!" he said in response to the suggestion that EA has changed its ways.

"The thing is, it doesn't work that way – you can't be a floor wax and then decide that you're going to become a dessert topping.

"That doesn't work, it's your DNA. [EA's] DNA isn't oriented towards that model – it doesn't know how to do it, as a culture or as a company, and it never has."

Zing.