Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has been swinging at everyone in the gaming world, and taking his own fair share of lumps in the process. Over the last year, the executive has made few friends among gamers and developers, though he has overseen the company raking in profits and placating shareholders. Instead of just highlighting the latest volley between Kotick and Tim Schafer, EA, and others in the industry, let’s look at exactly how he’s become one of the most hated names in gaming.

The trouble started in June of last year, when Activision filed suit to block EA from publishing Shafer’s adventure/RTS Brutal Legend. That wasn’t the big red flag for Kotick, though. The real drama happened last March, when Kotick got on the radar of the gaming world after the unceremonious firing of Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella. The two were thrown out just a few months after the November 2009 release of Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the single largest video game release to date, which made $310 million in its first day. Sales would top $1 billion by mid-January 2010. Kotick repeatedly defended the firings, saying West and Zampella were insubordinate and planning to file lawsuits against the company. Infinity Ward quickly deflated within Activision, with 35 staffers moving on to West and Zampella’s new development house, Respawn Entertainment. Since then, 38 Infinity Ward employees filed suit against Activision for unpaid bonuses.

That set the stage for Kotick’s infamy, but instead of fading from the limelight as just the head of a massive gaming publisher, he’s continued to poke and prod at figures in the industry far beyond Infinity Ward. Read the full story of Kotick’s war of the words after the break.

In August of last year, Kotick said he wanted to see game prices raise above their current price points, during an investor call:

You know if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further.

A month later, Kotick made even bigger waves when he outright said he wanted to take the fun out of making video games. That’s literally what he said:

The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games… We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression

In an interview with Edge Magazine in July this year, Kotick expressed his frustration with Microsoft’s profiting from the multiplayer component in Modern Warfare 2, saying Activision should be getting a bigger cut from the action (outside of initial game sales and ongoing DLC sales):

We’ve heard that 60% of subscribers are principally on Live because of Call Of Duty. We don’t really participate financially in that income stream. We would really like to be able to provide much more value to those millions of players playing on Live, but it’s not our network.

Just two weeks ago, Kotick praised Bungie (which recently entered a 10-year publishing agreement with Activision), at the Deutsch Bank 2010 Technology Conference, backhandedly insulting every other independent developer in the process:

Bungie are a very unusual company. They’re probably the last remaining high quality independent developer. That has sort of has institutional skills and capabilities. And they’re a real company.

Double Fine Productions head and developer of Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Brutal Legend Tim Schafer threw one of the first big anti-Kotick volleys in the industry, in an interview with Eurogamer in July:

His obligation is to his shareholders. Well, he doesn’t have to be as much of a dick about it, does he? I think there is a way he can do it without being a total prick. It seems like it would be possible. It’s not something he’s interested in.

Kotick fired back yesterday in Edge Magazine, noting Brutal Legend’s mixed reviews and poor sales numbers:

I’ve never met him in my life – I’ve never had anything to do with him. I never had any involvement in the Vivendi project that they were doing, Brütal Legend, other than I was in one meeting where the guys looked at it and said, ‘He’s late, he’s missed every milestone, he’s overspent the budget and it doesn’t seem like a good game. We’re going to cancel it.’ And do you know what? That seemed like a sensible thing to do. And it turns out, he was late, he missed every milestone, the game was not a particularly good game.

That wasn’t all Kotick said yesterday. He revisited the West and Zampella firing in the same interview, saying:

That’s one of those really difficult decisions as the CEO of a company, where you step back and say, ‘No good is going to come of this. They’re going to leave and probably have a really hard time ever being productive or successful ever again, and we’re going to lose some talented people, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

He then turned his sights on EA:

Look, EA has a lot of resources, it’s a big company that’s been in business for a long time, maybe it’ll figure it out eventually. But it’s been struggling for a really long time. The most difficult challenge it faces today is: great people don’t really want to work there.

EA corporate communications VP Jeff Brown responded immediately in a statement to IndustryGamers, citing Kotick’s history with both Infinity Ward and Double Fine:

Kotick’s relationship with studio talent is well-documented in litigation. His company is based on three game franchises – one is a fantastic persistent world he had nothing to do with; one is in steep decline; and the third is in the process of being destroyed by Kotick’s own hubris.

Oh, snap. Ball’s back in your court, Bob.