Phil Harrison is doing his best to prove Activision’s publishing strategy wrong by turning Ghostbusters into a profitable gaming franchise.
By acquiring the Ghostbusters game rights, Atari head Phil Harrison added a popular movie license to his turnaround repertoire.
The rights were conveniently passed up by Activision-Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick, who didn’t consider the game to “have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential” and “become a $100 million dollar” franchise.
Harrison told MCV that he intends on proving Kotick wrong, squeezing opportunity from thrown out titles.
“What Bobby, perhaps unhelpfully said, was that those games were franchises which wouldn’t make $100m of revenue and generate sequels,” explained Harrison. “If that’s his benchmark, then fine – and we’d love to aspire to the same benchmarks. But you know what? I would love to turn Ghostbusters into a $100 million franchise, just to prove him wrong.”
Rather than simply settling for sloppy seconds, CEO David Gardner also believes games like Ghostbusters have potential under Atari. He stated, “We evaluated those games and just because they aren’t a good fit for Activision doesn’t mean they aren’t a good fit for us.”
