Organizational Overview (Essay Example)

Activision Publishing Inc. is an American video game publisher that is based in Santa Monica, California. It consists of several subsidiary studios and actually serves as the publishing business for its parent company Activision Blizzard. The Activision company has a huge team size of around 10,000 total employees that branch out to 196 countries. Activision is most known for their Call of Duty games but they also developed the Crash Bandicoot games. Activision was founded on October 1, 1979, in Sunnyvale, California by former Atari game developers that were not getting the treatment they felt they deserved at Atari. Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer. In fact, the video game crash of 1983 was actually because so many other companies were trying to be just like Activision. 

Activision is a company that has games available on a wide variety of devices. Activision is in fact the leading worldwide developer, publisher, and distributor of interactive entertainment on console, mobile, and PC. Of course, Activision games are available on both PS4 and Xbox consoles as those are the most common way people tend to game nowadays. They also have games available on the mobile aspect as well with their game Call of Duty: Mobile. Mobile and consoles are not the only way that you are able to play Activision games it is also available on PC versions of the game. Also, Activision also currently has some of their games available on the Nintendo Switch such as Crash Bandicoot but they do not have all of their games on there like the Call Of Duty series or the Destiny series. The last console that Activision is available on is the WII console when they made their Guitar Hero series and the Skylanders series. 

Activision is most known for its creation of the Call Of Duty series but they also provide other games. For example, Activision was the company that created the Guitar Hero series which was a huge thing on the WII consoles. Activision was also the company that created the Tony Hawks Pro Skater series which is a pretty big game series that a lot of people have enjoyed since its creation in 1999. Another big Activision product that a lot of people are still actively playing is Overwatch. Overwatch is a 6v6 arena-based game where you have special characters that do different abilities that can support your team. Activision is active in games in a huge variety of different genres. The game genre that Activision is most known for would be FPS games because of how big the Call of Duty series has become. Another game genre that is a huge part of Activision would be Action-adventure because of how big the Crash Bandicoot series used to be. Nowadays, not as many people still play this game series but back on the original PlayStations 1 and 2 it was a huge franchise. The last genre I would associate Activision with would have to be Sports and simulation because the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series is a sports simulation game and that was one of Activision’s biggest game series. 

Activision has been involved in the news recently for a couple of different reasons. First, Activision has been all over the news because Microsoft just signed a 68.7 billion dollar deal with Activision to acquire the company as a whole. Another big reason that Activision has been in the recent news is that they are having tons of employees walk out of their office because they have lifted the vaccine mandate to be able to work there. In the past couple of years, Activision has had a couple of failures in the game industry. The first example would have to be Call of Duty: Vanguard and I say this is a failure because it is one of the lowest selling games in the entire franchise since the first Call of Duty. Another game that a lot of players seem to not care about is Call of Duty: Cold War. Even though, this game sold a lot of copies and had a good release players including myself absolutely despised this game. They improperly balanced the weapons and a lot of the aspects of the game feel very rushed so it just plain wasn't a good game. 

The Activision company is involved with almost every aspect of the game industry. Activision is widely involved in content creation because they have created tons of game series that have been incredibly successful they also are involved widely in project management as every game company should be. The aspect of the game industry I would say Activision is most active in would have to be the marketing and distribution aspects. I say this because Activision is highly active on multiple platforms of social media and creates posts and ads to get others to want to buy their game. They also, put a lot of their ads on food items like soda and chips that a lot of “gamers” are known to eat more than other people. I also stated that they are a big part of the distribution part of the game industry because Activision is a publishing company and what they do is distribute. Activision blizzard generates its revenue streams from both sales of video games and also in-game purchases on their games. Blizzard stated that its biggest revenues came from the Activision segment which accounted for 34% of total revenues. Activision makes a lot of its money from in-game purchases but also makes a lot of money from selling the video games by themselves.