Activision Blizzard and Social Gaming: Call of Duty: Elite is the first step

As EA and Zynga struggle in their very own social version of the David and Goliath story (guess who the giant is!), Activision Blizzard has sat back watching. Waiting. Calculating. Now, the number one games publisher in the world is finally ready to enter the space with Call of Duty: Elite, which the company showed off just recently. And, according to an interview with Industry Gamers, Activision's involvement in the space won't go much farther than that for some time.

"I think what Activision has done, very smartly, is we don't want to rush into anything until we figure out what our unique contribution and what our unique competitive advantage can be," Activision Blizzard Publishing boss Eric Hirshberg said to Industry Gamers. "What we're choosing to do is use social and mobile and the fact that people are playing games in different parts of the day on different devices than they have before as a way to strengthen our core business. That's what we're doing with Call of Duty: Elite."

However, Hirshberg mentioned to Industry Gamers that its upcoming kids game, Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure is a step in the social/casual games direction as well. The multi-platform console game, said to release this fall, will allow kids to upload a selection of associated toys into the game for them to play with. According to Hirshberg, the game will have an iPhone app and even a web hub for kids to have extra connectivity to the game world.

But essentially the reason we've yet to see a Facebook or mobile game from Activision Blizzard is because it was too busy learning from the burgeoning industry's successes and mistakes. Now, the company is ready to enter the social games space, but not in a way that veterans like EA, Square Enix and Atari are hopping on board. Rather, Activision wants to embrace this genre in a way that enhances its existing games--like creating its own social network for all things Call of Duty. Hirshberg calls it a "sophisticated and measured response," we call it being a scaredy-cat.