Activision Wants Consoles to be Replaced by PCs



We live in a world where we have mul­ti­ple plat­forms for gam­ing. PC, PS3, 360, WII, etc. Each plat­form has vary­ing amounts of pow­er when it comes to play­ing games. Games are released across sev­er­al plat­forms and the plat­forms that have the weak­est specs or the worst con­trols tend to get the watered down, crap­pi­er ver­sions of the games released.

Activi­sion, one of the lead­ing cross plat­form pub­lish­ers, wish­es to move away from the “walled gar­dens” set by Sony, Microsoft and Nin­ten­do.

The pres­i­dent of Activi­son, Bob­by Kotick, believes that the major­i­ty of peo­ple pay­ing to use XBL are pay­ing to play Mod­ern War­fare 2 — ‑Activi­sion does not get a share of that prof­it.

“We’ve heard that 60 per cent of [Microsoft­’s] sub­scribers are prin­ci­pal­ly on Live because of Call of Duty,” Kotick told FT. “We don’t real­ly par­tic­i­pate finan­cial­ly in that income stream. We would real­ly like to be able to pro­vide much more val­ue to those mil­lions of play­ers play­ing on Live, but it’s not our net­work.”

While one might feel bad that activi­sion isn’t get­ting in on it’s “share” of the prof­its one does have to real­ize that it releas­es $15 dol­lar map­packs that it sells mil­lions of. Hav­ing said this it isn’t like Activi­sion is hurt­ing for mon­ey.

Kotick­’s solu­tion is to turn to the PC, where it can set its own mod­el for pric­ing – not unlike what Bliz­zard has done with World of War­craft and Battle.net. Kotick stat­ed that Activi­sion would “very aggres­sive­ly” sup­port the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt of mak­ing an easy ‘plug-and-play’ PC that would hook up direct­ly to the TV.

While I would love to see gam­ing return to the PC as a pri­ma­ry gam­ing plat­form one does have to real­ize that their are some games that just play bet­ter on con­sole based sys­tems such as side scrollers, sports games, and par­ty games. It’s very hard to use the PC as a par­ty plat­form because a sin­gle unit does not pro­vide play access to 4 or more peo­ple simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. If this issue could be addressed then it would make the PC more viable as a mass appeal plat­form. I hate play­ing games on any­thing oth­er then a PC, espe­cial­ly shoot­ers. One does have to real­ize, how­ev­er, that some games just play bet­ter on con­soles.

Con­soles do pro­vide oth­er ele­ments to devel­op­ers that make it eas­i­er and cheap­er to pro­duce games. Games made for con­soles have the exact same require­ments across the board for every­one play­ing so you only have to test the game on one sys­tem instead of 300 mil­lion dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions. Con­soles also have the ease of play fac­tor that you don’t get cur­rent­ly with PC games and thats just putting the CD in and play­ing. Gen­er­al­ly with PC’s you have to install the game before you can play it and for those less knowl­edge­able this can be a real pain.