Dennis Durkin is head of Activision Blizzard and has been since 2013. The company just released its latest game, Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and sold more than $500 million on release day alone – that’s more than any other game ever before.

Though he has held several different positions in the industry and is an executive committee member at the International Game Developers Association, his name only sometimes calls to mind what he has done so far in the games industry.

After studying business at university, Durkin went to work for Electronic Arts – a company that made more than $2 billion in revenues last year. Before this, he had worked for Activision for 14 years and developed successful PC games, including Enemy Territory and Diablo II.

As the head of Activision, Durkin is responsible for around half of the industry sales.

Dennis Durkin said you have to start with a sense of mission and purpose and be very disciplined about that. If you need to be more disciplined about focusing on your business and executing against it, you end up in either chaos or drift.

Dennis Durkin travels around 50% of the time – visiting China, EA HQ in Los Angeles, and distributors out of town. It’s not about sitting at my desk, he said. It’s about getting out there, meeting people, talking, learning, and seeing things.

Though he may not be a gamer himself, Durkin has seen the improvements in gaming firsthand over his 30-year career. “The quality of the games and the level of creativity is still increasing in these products he said. We are using technological boundaries to do things we never thought possible.

Anyone who knows anything about Durkin Durkin Executive knows that his passion for games hasn’t been dampened even after all this time. I don’t think about work at home, he said. That’s what weekends are for.

Source: https://news.microsoft.com/tag/dennis-durkin/