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Activision Wants Consoles To Be Replaced By PCs

Posted by Soulskill on from the oppose-on-principle dept.

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."

5 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. Bobby Kotick again by SquarePixel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While moving away from consoles 'walled gardens' sounds great and the summary makes it sound all nice and everything, this is Bobby Kotick were talking about. The CEO of Activision who's primary goal is to milk as much money from computer games as possible by any means necessary.

    In the article he is angry that while people pay for XBL subscriptions, Activision doesn't get any share of that. Basically he wants people to pay Activision a monthly subscription for online services, on top of the normal price for games. While it makes sense for games like MMO's where the developer needs the monthly subscription to keep up their massive server farms and keep creating new content, the usual multiplayer games don't require that. Just see Valve and TF2 or countless amount of other multiplayer games.

    Forget about "opening up consoles", making the world a better place, ending wars and famine, he just wants more money.

    1. Re:Bobby Kotick again by FriendlyLurker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The CEO of Activision who's primary goal is to milk as much money from computer games as possible by any means necessary.

      In this case, the point is moot. Anyone who supports an open standard platform for gaming gets my vote, greedy or not. Walled gardens, especially when they are the dominant garden in the park, are never good for consumer choice or price in the long run. Sure Kotick can charge more on the PC than on some propriety gaming platform where he must follow orders. But he also can't exclude competition or dictate any terms to anyone else... so go to it Activision, I really hope you succeed in making a plugin and play gaming PC platform based on open standards!

    2. Re:Bobby Kotick again by Eraesr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Bobby Kotick's ultimate goal isn't an open platform. His goal is a platform that's very much closed off, but where he determines the rules instead of Microsoft. The reason he roots for the PC as a platform to do this on is because it's the only platform that is open enough for him to start up his own walled garden.

      It's bad news all-round. If every publisher started up it's own variant of XBox Live, you'd have to pay subscription fees for every publisher, maybe for every game. You'd be working yourself into serious debts if you want to sustain (multiplayer) access to a variety of games from different publishers.

  2. Re:Console vs PC Gaming Experience by mjwx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Console:
    1. try to make out text that isnt aliased/sampled properly.
    2. play for 5 minutes.
    3. Level transition time, loading.
    4. play.
    5. load.
    6. play.
    7. load.
    8. change disk.
    9. load.
    10. RROD.
    11. vendor retroactively takes features.
    12. game vendor nickels and dimes you for DLC.
    13. after 13 DLC's at $5 each you finally have a full game.

    PC
    1. Set resolution to monitors native (most games do this automatically now).
    2. Play.
    3. Keep playing.
    4. Holy crap, there's more then 4 hours of content in the game and no loading screen.
    5. Enjoy quicksaving.
    6. Get free content from the distributor (thanks valve and stardock).
    7. Play the game 15 years later on your modern gaming PC.

    --
    Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  3. Re:Console vs PC Gaming Experience by scdeimos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Today's games are 10000 times bigger.

    Today's games are only 10,000 times bigger because of the higher-fidelity audio and higher-resolution graphics. The games themselves are not 10,000 times more complex, otherwise they'd be unplayable by humans, so they have no excuse to be any more unstable than their older counterparts.

    Sorry, I agree with the GP... patchable console games make for shittier games because publishers are more inclined to say "she'll be right, we can patch it after release."