“It was made very clear to us: If it did not have an opportunity to be a billion-dollar-plus franchise, don’t consider it,” said Dusty Welch, a top Activision executive. Later, Kotick would be vilified for this approach and criticized by players for running franchises into the ground. One comment to investors, which Kotick later said was meant to be a joke, would hang over him for the rest of his career. “The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged-goods folks into Activision about ten years ago,” he said, “was to take all the fun out of making video games.”
