I was struck by the shortsightedness of Activision CEO Bobby Kotick on the limited prospects of digital distribution (or at least, that it is going to take a long, long time before it has impact). Valve (who just released Ep1 Steam stats) and the folks in the casual games space may have a thing or two to say about that… Ditto for an extensive report from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Even more surprising, days later, Activision announces a new publishing office in Seoul, South Korea. Good for them. But, let us not forget that over 95% of the Korean market is online. From the announcement, it was unclear if the office plans to push boxed product, or do stuff online (especially in light of Kotick dim views of digital distribution).

This all brings up an interesting passage from some economic/organizational behavior research I’ve been doing:

Some organizational fields are characterized by a distinct dominance order in which a few groups of actors [ie, publishers like Activision] operate at the apex while others survive on the bottom. In such instances, groups of influential actors have vested interests in preserving the social order [ie, boxed product sales via retailers]. Consequently, structural innovations seldom emerge out of the center of a hierarchically-organized field, but instead, originate in the periphery, and may conflict with the interests of central players. Since actors at the periphery of a field possess little influence and lack resources, social movements are the vehicles of collective action by which new forms become established. Such social movements typically assume a ‘conflict-oriented’ character in the sense that conflict arises when organized attempts to modify the prevalent institutional order encounter opposition [ie, like pooh-poohing on digital distribution] from interest groups opposed to the change.

This also relates heavily to the “margins” threads from the likes of Warren Spector and Eric Zimmerman over the past couple of years…