According to Kotick, buying the Project Gotham Racing studio back in 2007 'violated all our principles.'
Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of Activision Blizzard, has buyers remorse when it comes to acquiring Bizarre Creations back in 2007.
In a recent interview with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins on the Grit Podcast, Kotick called the British studio a "bad acquisition." However, he could not name said studio in the interview, and described it as "um...in Manchester, that did the driving game for Xbox."
Bizarre, which is located in Liverpool, developed the Project Gotham Racing games for the original Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles. Activision Blizzard bought the studio for an initial $67.4 million, with an additional $40 million if certain benchmarks were hit over the next five years.
From 2008 to 2010, Bizarre released four games—Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, Geometry Wars: Touch, Blur, and James Bond 007: Blood Stone—before its shutdown in 2011.
Kotick went on to discuss a "really good guy, who was running the day-to-day," whom he could not name, but appears to be then-studio head Brian Woodhouse. He considered Woodhouse "brilliant," but said Bizarre itself was an "$80 million" acquisition overall, and was subsequently written off two years later. "Everything about it violated all our principles."
Nonetheless, he noted his former company's acqusition strategy was to buy companies for their proprietary technology, IP, or "history of profitability." Keeping a studio's management and ensuring that company still had its independence was also considered a stark contrast to a studio like EA, which he said would acquire a developer and replace the original name with its own branding.
High-level video game executives often speak warmly about the studios they've acquired, and talk up the potential value they can add to the publisher's portfolio. This was, after all, how Microsoft sold the public on its acquisitions of Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax, and other third-party developers.
Kotick's thoughts on Bizarre are more candid than most in his former position have been able to give, or at least more intentional. Often, if an executive is disappointed in a studio, they critique their most recent release and cut that developer's staff, as recently seen with BioWare and Phoenix Labs.
As another example, Xbox boss Matt Booty talked about making "smaller games that give us prestige and awards" in 2023, just days after closing Tango Gameworks, makers of the acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush.
After Bizarre's closure, several alums went on to found Lucid Games, which went on to continue Geometry Wars and more recently release Destruction AllStars on PlayStation 5. Lucid is also a co-developer on Rare's Sea of Thieves, and was acquired by Lightspeed Studios in 2023. At the time of that acquisition, Lucid said it would leverage its new parent company's resources while "continuing to enjoy full independence in the games that we create and the operation of the studio."
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