Bungie had no option but to sign with Activision, the publisher's CEO has suggested.

"When they started the process of looking for a new partner they had a vision for a kind of product they wanted to create that needed certain skills and capabilities," Bobby Kotick told an audience at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch's Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in California.

"As they started looking at the obvious candidates they realised that no company other than Activision had the skills they needed to be successful for their vision for that product.

"These are things that you would never have envisioned five years ago," continued Kotick. "Blizzard has 2500 people in customer services just for World of Warcraft. How you train them, how you manage them, how you organise them, how you use CRM tools to be really effective in satisfying the expectations of your audience is something that no other company had.

"When Bungie started to think about their future product plan and realised how deficient they and everyone else was in providing all the services necessary to create great competitive products for the future, they didn't really have any other alternative."

Could all this talk of huge customer service requirements mean that Bungie has an MMO in its sights?

Bungie signed a 10-year multi-platform agreement with Activision in April. It has just started building its new gameplay engine following the launch of its final title for Microsoft Game Studios, Halo: Reach.