Activision and Tale of Tales Comparison

Tale of Tales
Tale of Tales is a games development studio, founded by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn in Belgium in 2002. Their games are much less conventional, the first starting with the design of 8, a PC exploration game based on the folk tales of Sleeping Beauty.
They push the boundaries of what we would usually expect to see in a video game, and raises the questions of "what is a video game?". The purpose of their games are to create elegant and emotionally rich interactive entertainment. They do not cater to the everyday gamer, unlike Activision, but try to reach out to those who would like a wider variety of gameplay experiences.

Just like the creators of professor layton, smaller companies need to think outside of the box when designing new styles of gameplay, for their games to compete with the bigger studios like Activision and Ubisoft.

Another game they created, Fatale, is inspired by Oscar Wildes 19th century play, Salome, with the game taking place after the events in the play.

Fatale is played through first person 3D navigation but its controls were designed to minimize the risk of motion sickness. As a result, it may appear somewhat unconventional to the seasoned gamer.

This quote taken from the Tale of Tales website shows that they are not creating games for the seasoned gamer market, but perhaps the opposite. Although I do not think this is their intention, I think this is a good idea because they appeal to the non-conventional gamers and do not have to compete with most other game studios.

At the end of the game Fatale, there is a short epilogue which shows Salome dancing, this is a video showing the making of the dance of the 7 veils. At first I thought they had used motion capture, which seemed unusual for a smaller studio, but infact it was created by hand based on vido recordings.
http://tale-of-tales.com/Fatale/dance.html

Activision
Activision comes under the Activision Blizzard umbrella organisation along with Blizzard, which has studios and offices all over the world. Activision is now one of the largest third party video game publishers in the world.
Activision is responsible for bringing us well known video game series' such as Guitar Hero and Call of Duty. Games like these, especially the Call of Duty franchise, have a huge following and the more they create the bigger the hype each game gets. However, they have often been criticised as being the same and overrated. From the companies point of view, they should keep publishing the franchise because it makes them a lot of money and there are many casual gamers that still enjoy playing the game, but publishing games like these means they are less inclined to take risks in releasing other styles of game. 
Games created for a larger audience

Comparisons
Most of the games published by Activision are what i would call "typical" video games, they are fast paced, provide exhilerating gameplay and enjoyable for the audiences they are aimed at. However,  Tale of Tales creates artistic games that cater to the emotions of the player.
Activision creates games that take you on a journey by the hand with a start middle and end, whereas tale of tales creates games that allow the player to explore a world as they wish.
Activision creates games to allow the player to experince specific experiences, whereas Tale of Tales encourages the player to simply play for playings sake.
Tale of tales expresses games as an art form.