Activision's Kotick: "[My goal has been] to take all the fun out of making video games"

If you weren't convinced before Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is ruthless and out of touch with gamers, this latest quote should put you over the edge. At the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference today, he presented the company's plans for the future and thoughts on the past decade since the switch to a corporate style of doing business. The highlight, of course, is this little number:

"We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."

Kotick was commenting on the transformation of Activision, which has really picked up in the past few years. On this front he remarked, "You have studio heads who five years ago didn't know the difference between a balance sheet and a bed sheet who are now arguing allocations in our CFO's office pretty regularly."

Regarding the current state of the economy, how he's dealt with it for his company is to instill "skepticism, pessimissm, and fear" into their culture, adding, "We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."

Policies aside, Kotick also praised the idea of Activision games free of consoles, saying it levels the playing field some and gives leverage with first parties in terms of "downloadable content and the business model," this in keeping with their recent flux of peripheral-packaged titles. The CEO went on to note we should "expect many of [their] products to be playable independent of a console," citing his positive impressions of services like OnLive, which streams games via PC.