Activision

Posted on April 19, 2013 By Eva Robinson Brands, Toys, Video games

About

For many gamers around the world, Activision is a familiar name. Founded in October 1979, Activision was the first independent developer of video games for different gaming consoles. It’s interesting to know that the company founders first worked as developers for Atari, but felt that they didn’t get enough credit for their contribution. Therefore, they founded their own company which continued their previous work as a third party developer for Atari 2600. By 1980, this changed as Activision presented their own console by the name of Atari 2600. Corporate culture was unique as most of the developers were treated as the best asset of the company. Activision has proven well in the gaming business and today is among top three largest video game publishers in the world. In 2007, according to the NPD Group, they were the top publisher in the US. In December 2007, Activision was acquired by Vivendi and the company continued to operate under the name Activision Blizzard. Beside this merging, Activision still continues to function as a single unit releasing lots of hit games like Call of Duty along with popular titles from Vivendi.

Products

Games – ‘Fishing Derby’ was the first of many titles that Activision made as an independent company. After several other decent games, in 1982 they released ”Pitfall!” which was the second best-selling game for the Atari 2600 (right after Pac-Man). It managed to create lots of profits with over 4 millions copies sold. Success continued in the 90’s with release of popular titles like Battlezone and the Tony Hawk series adding new categories and dimensions in the gaming world. After the merger with Vivendi, even more groundbreaking games were developed with the use of new technology. From 2000 until 2010, games like ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Spyro the Dragon’ generated most of Activision’s income making it one of the best game developers in the world. Marvel comics and Bond series also entrusted their stories to Activision and were famous during the last decade.

Toys – Following the big success of ‘Spyro The Dragon’, Activision created a new way of gaming as 32 toys (called Skylanders) based on the characters of the game were offered for sale. The interesting part is that every one of these toys is in a way connected with games of the Spyro series. To be clearer, everything that these character do in the game is automatically stored in toy’s memory. Seems confusing right? It is very simple actually. If your kid buys a toy he can do all the imaginary fighting with other toys he has at home. But he can also use the code of the toy to go online and play the game with other friends. As he progresses online, those achievements get saved in the memory of his toy. That means, he can take the toy anywhere and use the ”portal” to play with his improved character on any console and any version of the game. Because of this Skylanders toys have made great turnover and income.