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“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,” said EA corporate communications VP Jeff Brown in a statement. That’s after Bobby Kotick, Activision CEO said EA had “lost its way” and that “if you have no other option, you might consider them.”

Oh, but that’s not all, Kotick was just getting warmed up.

The Activision boss said EA does business in the exact opposite way they do, saying Activision gives studios freedom to exercise their own culture, while EA on the other hand suffocates those it owns.

“The core principle of how we run the company is the exact opposite of EA,” he told Edge. “EA will buy a developer and then it will become ‘EA Florida’, ‘EA Vancouver’, ‘EA New Jersey’, whatever. We always looked and said, ‘You know what? What we like about a developer is that they have a culture, they have an independent vision and that’s what makes them so successful.’ We don’t have an Activision anything – it’s Treyarch, Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer.”

“That, to me, is one of the unassailable rules of building a publishing company. And in every case except for two, the original founders of the studios are still running the studios today. The only thing that we try to do is to provide a support structure to make them more successful. If you do a really good job – and a lot of our studios do – you get to pick what is, in my view, the most difficult thing to pick in the industry: to make original intellectual property.”

Kotick continued, adding contrary to what EA’s been saying concerning its own city-state development structure, Kotick feels that’s more talk than action.

“You can’t be a floor wax and then decide that you’re going to become a dessert topping,” he said. “That doesn’t work, it’s your DNA. [EA’s] DNA isn’t oriented towards that model – it doesn’t know how to do it, as a culture or as a company, and it never has… 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.

It’s like, if you have no other option, you might consider them. They have some… the team that makes Madden is a really great team, it’s been able to manage, capture and keep some good people. But we have no shortage of opportunity to recruit out of EA – that’s their biggest challenge: its stock options have no value. It’s lost its way. And until it has success, and hits, and gets that enthusiasm back for the company, it’s going to have a struggle getting really talented people, which is going to translate into less-than-great games.”

I’m not sure what’s going on with Kotick but something seems extremely odd here. Is Kotick hurt by the Infinity Ward fiasco? He sure is.

But still, lashing out against your competitor in such a distasteful manner is sure to cause controversy, hence EA’s response. I’ve never seen the two biggest publishers in the industry go head-to-head like this, but there’s a first time for everything.

Much damage has been done.