Bobby Kotick, president and CEO of the newly-formed Activision Blizzard, has spoken about why Activision did not renew its membership of the US Entertainment Software Association.

"With the combined companies, the dues went up enough that I said for it to make sense (to pay the ESA's fees), we have to make a strategic plan.

"We don't have that because nobody owns it for us right now.

"We'll have someone soon", he added.

SPOnG set its Corporo-bullshit translators to to full power, nearly overheating them and exploding the Underwater Castle in the process. We worked out that what he means is "We've got to work out if it's worth the money and there's no one in the company who is doing that at the moment."

Interestingly though, the company had quit the ESA before the merger with Vivendi Games had even been ratified by Activision's own stockholders.

Activision Blizzard also wants to have its own point of contact with the government. Because Activision Blizzard is special. Kotick stated, "We have our own issues that are not the industry's issues. Our challenges are sufficiently different from other publishers' issues that we need our own point person." He referred to the subscription model that funds World of Warcraft and the large chunk of the company's business in China as examples.

Kotick says he was gentle with Mike Gallagher, the president and CEO of the ESA. "I said don't view it as anything but time off." They're on a break!

But, asked whether his company will take the ESA back, Kotick merely said, "We'll consider it."

Activision left the ESA earlier in the year, as did Vivendi and LucasArts.

^{Source: Variety}