During his DICE keynote, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick spoke about the way he's perceived within the gaming industry, phrasing it in a way that all of us can understand.

"I don't know how this happened, but all my life I was the rebel flying the Millennium Falcon or the X-Wing fighter," stated Kotick. "And suddenly I wake up and I'm on board the Death Star."

Kotick also addressed one of his more infamous quotes in which he said something along the lines of "taking the fun out of game development."

"Sometimes that commitment to excellence, well, you can come across as being like a dick, and when I say things like 'taking the fun out of making video games,' it was a line that has been often-quoted lately, but it was a line I used for investors," he explained. "It was mainly because I wanted to somehow come across in a humorous way that we were responsible, in the way we made our games in that it wasn't some wild west, lack of process exercise and that we really did give some thought to the capital being used to provide a return of investment to shareholders. So I say things like 'taking the fun out of video games' knowing full well that all we're actually trying to do is keep the fun in the process because, as most of you know, when you're getting into crunch time it becomes really difficult to meet those milestones or get things polished the way you would like, that isn't a lot of fun. That is not what I meant by it."

The Activision exec admits to being somewhat removed from the creative process in game development, saying, "Sometime what winds up happening when you are 50,000 feet above is you can get insulated from that creative passion." Kotick cites how he originally dismissed Blizzard's Warcraft and Will Wright's The Sims as examples of this.

"A lot of times when you get caught up in the financial details of the business, it makes you overlook what's really important, which is who's passionate, who's committed, who's inspired and where's the next idea going to come from," he concluded.

During an investor call following Activision Blizzard's financial results, CEO Mike Morhaime revealed that only a third of new players to World of Warcraft make it past level 10 - the tipping point at which the majority of gamers will then go on to become dedicated players.

Morhaime also revealed that the game still had a stable subscriber base of 11.5 million players, the same figure as that released when numbers were last discussed in July last year. With that drop-out rate in mind, Morhaime noted that with the release of Cataclysm, due later this year, the Blizzard team was redesigning the whole classic game world in a bid to bring all of the original content up to "current design standards".

[via gi.biz]

Activision Blizzard reported its Q4 and full-year financial results today during its investor conference call noting that the final quarter was the strongest quarter from a third-party publisher in the industry's history. Contributing to the huge quarter was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which became the company's third title in the last two years to break the $1 billion revenue mark.

CEO Bobby Kotick reports the company has "exceeded every expectation," posting a $4.3 billion revenue for the year, amounting to a profit of $113 million. In 2008, the company's revenue was $3.0 billion, which amounted to a loss of $107 million.

As mentioned before, Modern Warfare 2 was a huge contributing factor for the company's strong forth quarter. However, even in spite of that, their fourth quarter was actually down year-over-year from $1.64 billion to $1.56 billion.

Activision also revealed the company's 2010 line-up, which included hard-hitters like StarCraft II and the World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm.

Aside from dropping the big news on StarCraft II, Activision Blizzard also detailed its other games coming out later this year. The lineup includes the "usual suspects," including the aforementioned StarCraft II, but also World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, a new Spider-Man title, yet another Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero, and, of course, Call of Duty. Also noted later was a new James Bond title scheduled to release this year.

Activision will be releasing two new IPs in 2010, not mentioned by name, but they're likely Bizarre Creations' Blur and Raven Software's Singularity.