Call of Duty: Black Ops shattered the five-day sales record, generating $650 million worldwide, and part of the game's success likely can be attributed to heavy marketing.

The most prominent ad featuring Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" and stars like Kobe Bryant was mostly embraced by gamers, but some TV networks, like ESPN (as pointed out by our friends at [a]listdaily) found the commercial to be completely inappropriate.

In a recent interview, IndustryGamers asked Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg, an advertising expert who previously helped Sony craft the Kevin Butler campaign, about the ad and the controversy surrounding it.

Hirshberg is none too pleased with TV networks like ESPN. He also feels that video games are still not given the respect they deserve.

"I would say given the content and the genre of the game it’s going to be difficult to do any marketing worth its salt that won’t have some measure of controversy baked into it. ... First and foremost, the most important thing is the game and the campaign seems to be beloved with the target audience; it really strikes a chord with gamers, and that’s what we were aiming for.

We’re not aiming for everybody on Earth and it’s not for everybody on Earth. We obviously only ran the commercial in appropriate places for an M-rated game, being careful to market to the people we were trying to reach.

The thing that I’m most happy about and relieved about is it seems to be getting an almost universally positive response from the gaming community," Hirshberg began.

He continued, "I’m going to put it in air quotes, which you can’t see, but the 'controversy' surrounding Kobe Bryant I find very hypocritical.

Those same networks that are now questioning Kobe’s inclusion in this had no problem accepting the ad and approving the ad, and accepting the dollars to run the ad on their networks.

Are they being irresponsible to their fan base by running the ad on their networks? Because if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander.

"I find that to be very hypocritical."

"I also think that there’s a little bit of a maturation process going on for video games overall where certain people still don’t see them as mainstream entertainment, but I wonder if Kobe or Jimmy Kimmel had been involved for the marketing of a new Tom Clancy movie if they would have gotten the same response.

I feel like this is still seen by some people as some sort of subculture or niche product, and the performance in the marketplace demonstrates that this is the epicenter of mainstream entertainment."