Activision is an American video game developer and publisher based currently in Santa Monica, California
A majority of Activision is owned by French conglomerate Vivendi SA. It was founded on October 1st 1979 where they were the world’s first independent developer and distributor; they created video games for consoles where they started with Atari 2600 cartridges from 1980.
Activision is now one of the largest third party video game publishers in the industry and held the title of being the top publisher for 2007 in the United States.
Vivendi acquired Activision in 2007, contributing its gaming division in take of a majority stake in the newly gained group. Even with a new company know as Activision Blizzard, Activision still exists as a subsidiary.
Activison (being a publisher and developer) have had numerous IP’s and Brands involved with their work, although this can be frowned upon by some people as they believe that this can strangle the opportunities of the developer to be able to create their own unique ideas.
But with their renowned success they have acquired many lines in which they can call their own products, such as the immensely popular “Call of Duty” series which could be considered the “mantelpiece” of the company whilst having third party IP’s like Marvel and Hasbro’s “Transformers” license.
Many studios are in Activision’s possession, whilst each usually has its own brand in which they work on. Infinity Ward is usually focussed on the “Call of Duty” line and Treyarch’s line of focus was on Marvel as High moon Studios were recently assigned with Transformers with their recent success of the branding in 2010’s release “War for Cybertron”.
But in Activision’s time it has also claimed and closed studios such as Luxoflux and Bizarre Creations.
Activison currently has an estimated workforce of around 4,000 with revenue of US$2.9 billion as judged by recent statistics.
Even with obtaining various IP’s, Activison continues to impress by using their studios to produce interesting and new visualisations of said brands, often sparking great success from them.
Overall, Activision have had great profit from the many years of business and with their current ability to stay so far in the industry, I believe they will continue for many years to come.
Tale of Tales is a Belgian developer that first started out producing art games and screensavers.
Founded in 2002 by Auriea Harvey (Who creates the team’s concept art, 3D Modelling and texture mapping.) and Michaël Samyn. (Who covers interaction, in-game effects, as well as the game’s programming.) Leaving most of the creative work to Auriea, the both of them had been working together on a websites for a former company.
Tate of Tale’s main focus of their creations was producing retellings of fairy tales in the form of adventure games.
“The purpose of Tale of Tales is to create elegant and emotionally rich interactive entertainment.” As stated on their website.
This is a very different approach for a business in the games industry, trying to stray away from referring to them as games almost.
The team consists of roughly under 20 people as listed on their site, only 4 concept artists working together than most mainstream developers who have entire art departments with separate mangers/directors dedicated to producing concepts and initial visuals to a game in the development process.
Meaning that for a small Indy team like tale of Tales, concepts and ideas are developed more freely off one another as a smaller team could mean that a design or look has more chance on being involved rather than when in a large studio with a whole team of 15 or over artists working together, a lot more detail and consideration is involved and taken out to all of the assets found in a game.
With a studio the likely-hood that an Art Director is included is a lot higher, meaning that viewings and development is more guided and influenced towards to what is needed to the initial design of the game.
One game produced by Tale of Tales called “The Endless Forest” is an online Multiplayer game. The game bears no “core” gameplay without any sole premise or drive of story.
“The Endless Forest has no rules, no targets, no foes and no scores. This is a liberating gaming experience which just allows you to play for playing’s sake” as quoted by Chella Ramanan of gameindustry.com, implying that this game’s main premise is on interaction and the reactions you achieve from it.
February 2010 was when Tale of Tales released “Vanitus”, being described as “a memento mori for your digital hands”. Their first work for the iPhone OS and music supplied by Zoë Keating. Two large projects have been announced by the Indy developer as they plan to work on them for a year and a half from March 2010 onto September 2011.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision
http://www.activision.com/index.html
http://tale-of-tales.com/
http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/information/
http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/articles/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Tales_(developer)
http://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision
http://www.activision.com/index.html
http://tale-of-tales.com/
http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/information/
http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/articles/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Tales_(developer)
http://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/
