Activision CEO Kotick: “Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years”

When the CEO of the biggest company in gaming talks, people listen. And if those people are gamers, many of them spit some sort of venom in response. Kotick’s quotes, however, are not famous for this level of unbridled honesty. In fact, it’s rare you hear any executive be this upfront about the quality (or lack thereof) in its games.

The controversial executive told Game Informer Magazine that the company has dropped the ball with the lucrative Spider-Man license.

“Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years. They are bad games. They were poorly rated because they were bad games. We went away from what is Spider-Man. It’s about web-slinging. If you don’t do web-slinging, what is the fantasy of Spider-Man?”

(I played the most recent Spider-Man game, Web of Shadows. The web slinging and aerial combat were actually among the game’s highlights.. Overall, though, it was repetitive and fell squarely into the “6.5 out of 10″ range.)

Activision hasn’t announced any upcoming Spidey games, so it’s unclear what the company will do about this problem in the immediate future.

Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum has set a new standard for superhero games, and the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games (published by Activision) have been the best reviewed games in recent years with Spider-Man involved. The X-Men Origins Wolverine game drew critical acclaim as well. That one was also published by Activision, so perhaps the answer is just putting the license in the hands of a developer that has previously done good work on a comic book license.

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