Why Activision left the ESA

Ever since Activision (and its newly merged partner, Vivendi) dropped out of the Entertainment Software Assn., the videogame industry trade group, there has been a lot of speculation about what it means. Is Activision unhappy with ESA head Mike Gallagher's leadership? Was it the quadrupling in fees following the shrinking of E3, as Kotaku reported? Is there a bigger problem with the ESA, given that other companies including LucasArts, iD and Crave Entertainment have also quit?

Sort of, as it turns out. I posed the question to Activision (and now Activision Blizzard) CEO Bobby Kotick (right) during an interview for an upcoming story and he seemed pretty eager to clear things up.

First of all, Kotick says he told Gallagher not to view it as Activision leaving the ESA. "I said don't view it as anything but time off," he explained.

So what is the reason for the "time off?" Kotick says that given the scale of the merged company, its dues were going up substantially and it needed to justify the expenditure.

"With the combined companies, the dues went up enough that I said for it to make sense [to spend that money], we have to make a strategic plan," he explained. "We don't have that because nobody owns it for us right now."

Translation: Kotick feels that Activision Blizzard needs its own executive handling governmental relations. The ESA can't handle that for the company, he went on, because Activision Blizzard is not the same as other publishers.

"We have our own issues that are not the industry's issues," he went on, citing Blizzard's reliance on subscription revenue and the company's substantial business in China as examples. "Our challenges are sufficiently different from other publishers' issues that we need our own point person."

"We'll have someone soon," he promised.

And when that happens, will Activision Blizzard be ending its "time off" and rejoining the ESA? "We'll consider it," Kotick said noncommittally.

Not everyone is sympathetic to Kotick's position, though. I was interviewing the head of another videogame pubisher and asked him about members dropping out of the ESA. He said he wasn't too happy that some in the industry are "free riding" on others who choose to pay their dues to give the industry a public face.