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Activision Wants Consoles To Be Replaced By PCs
thsoundman writes with this excerpt from thegamersblog:
"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. Activision, one of the leading cross-platform publishers, wishes to move away from the 'walled gardens' set by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. ... [Activision CEO Bobby] 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 at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
"Innovation" is one of the reasons I hope he failed. With consoles, the developers know exactly what constraints they need to work within, and gamers know that if they buy a title for their console it WILL work, and work consistently.
Move away from console, and programmers start getting lazy. Why bother making the memory management more efficient when you can just change the 'minimum requirements' and put the burden on the consumer. Take away constraints, and they do not 'innovate', they just get lazy then drool over all the big numbers their super awesome game 'requires'.
And of course, if the game does not run for some reason, you can always blame the customer. Maybe they have some other app instealled, maybe their video card is just kinda the wrong model, maybe their processor does not implement some optional instructions.. maybe their swap latency is to high (heaven forbid PC programmers lock in memory and ignore swap, that might make their requirements unsexy!). There are dozens of little variation or interactions on a PC that can cause problems.... this is actually why I moved away from PC gaming. Game doesn't work? Too bad.