Speaking in a post earnings report conference call, Activision Blizzard's CEO Bobby Kotick has defended the company's decision to sell off Vivendi projects such as Ghostbusters, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena following last year's Activision and Vivendi merger.

"There were a lot of different projects and businesses that we identified as not likely to achieve the profit margin potential that we look for," Kotick said while fielding a question on the matter.

He was then asked whether Activision's strategy of emphasising bigger franchises over lesser known brands factored into the company's decision to sell in-development Vivendi games such as Ghostbusters and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, to which he replied:

"With respect to the franchises that don't have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform, with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of over time becoming $100 million plus franchises: that's a strategy that has worked very well for us."

"I think generally our strategy has been to focus [on games] . . . that we know if we release today, we'll be working on ten years from now," Kotick continued before going on to explain how unreliable investments in new intellectual properties can be.

"The difficulty in establishing new franchises or unproven franchises, as we've seen over the last 20 years, is one of the great challenges of the business . . .  You still need to have production of new, original intellectual property, but you need to do it very selectively and if you look at the number of new, original intellectual properties successfully launched in the market each year over the last five or ten years, it's a small single digit number."

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, the twelfth Spider-Man game to be published for consoles by Activision since 2000, was released last month.