Bungie â??the last remaining great indieâ?? – Kotick

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick wants the world to know his firm is embarking on an exclusive ten-year partnership with Bungie, and in typical fashion he is doing so by way of cavalier and comical sound bites.

Speaking at a recent investor meeting, the CEO of the world’s biggest third-party game publisher described Bungie as the last of a dying breed of game developers.

"Bungie are a very unusual company. They’re probably the last remaining high quality independent developer,” he said, as quoted by game news site CVG.

“And they’re a real company.”

The extraordinary claim will no doubt spark a reaction from hard working independent developers with a point to prove, as well as some of the bigger independent outfits that may feel their triple-A egos deflate a little.

Aside from Bungie and its fleet of in-house developers, Activision is known to be working with two other independent game studios. United Front Games is building True Crime for the publisher, and the steady British outfit Eurocom is on the biggest project of its life with the promising Wii game GoldenEye.

To make certain his comments would reverberate across the industry, the outspoken publishing kingpin also took a swipe at Microsoft for good measure.

“When Bungie started the process of looking for a new partner, they’d been in business with Microsoft. They had a vision for a product they wanted to create that needed certain skills and capabilities – that Microsoft had some of.

"But as they started to go and look at the obvious candidates, they realised that no company other than Activision had the skills that they needed to be successful for the vision of that product. These are things that you never would have envisioned five years ago,” he said.

Activision announced a landmark publishing partnership with Bungie back in April, having outbid a number of other interested parties.

[Source: CVG]