Kotick wants to weaken Xbox Live and PSN dominance

[Thor.]

I'm with ub3rman123 on this. Who or what is Kotick?

Wait what? Who is he?

 

The CEO of Activision. I personally dislike him and his ideas, especially since they're now merged with blizzard and how it might affect their future games.

For example, blizzard are known to take their time with games and not release until it's finished, but activion's stockholders might not like this, and simply say "Hey, if this was activision, it'd be out now, what gives? we want our money". I'm concerned how this will affect the quality of blizz' upcoming games.

 

And also this whole deal with the goddamn micro transactions and monthly fee for battlenet in some areas of the world.

 

Not saying it's actually his fault as I don't know for sure, I'm just concerned.

 

Maybe I'm just biased in my dislike for Kotick, but I'm inclined to blame him. It seems like EVERYTHING the dill-weed touches goes in this direction.

 

EDIT: And if MS and Sony DO get weakened in the console dept. I don't want Kotick getting his grubby, greedy claws on anything that doesn't explode with less force than an atom bomb. It would be bad enough if two developers who have already proven to do decent jobs wind up in the drink, but if Kotick steps in to take their places, it'd be a full blown disaster.

 

 

Agreed i doubt he would weeken Sony or ms, Have fun trying :biggrin:

[brokenergy]

Not surprising that a major cooperation had something to do with this (Activision is at the top of most hated companies, Ubisoft is a close second). I suppose he must have been doing "something bad" when he thought of that idea. Remove one juggernaut and replace with another, with $19.90 per month for content. It is simply brilliant. /sarcasm

[evilneko]

No way. Ubisoft is on top of that list.

 

Kotick's obviously not very knowledgeable about PCs. It's quite common for a TV to have a VGA input and some even have DVI. HDTVs pretty much universally have HDMI. And what's still the bog-standard video output on PCs and input on monitors? Right. VGA. Which is also quite common on TVs. Video cards with no VGA out come with DVI to VGA adapters. Higher-end video cards have DVI plus HDMI, plus the DVI to VGA adapter in the box.

 

I really don't see where he needs to "aggressively pursue" connecting PCs to TVs. Hell a friend of mine uses a 52" LCD HDTV as his monitor.. and intended to do so from the very start!

[brokenergy]

They are both first to me neko, it is just that Activision will come first because of alphabetical order.

[Retribution]

The only reason he's doing this is so he can get money for a subscription-based Call of Duty service.

[TheTerminator2004]

A PC that is explicitly designed to plug into a TV and play games like a console could be quite good. With standardised hardware, it could have many of the benefits of a PC, and many benefits of a console - hopefully making it the best of both worlds. Of course, thats assuming it would still be a normal PC, where you can do whatever you want with it, and which runs Windows or Linux, not some proprietary OS which is incompatible with everything else. And how they'd get that to work with a gamepad instead of a mouse and keyboard, I don't know. But, if marketed right, it could certainly break the dominance of the consoles, as well as net Activision a lot of cash. So it makes sense.

 

Whether it actually will turn out like that, and not end up being just another console, is another question altogether.

[evilneko]

A PC that is explicitly designed to plug into a TV and play games like a console could be quite good. With standardised hardware

 

That is what a console is! It's pretty much the only thing that really differentiates consoles from PCs. Linux runs on consoles already. Windows could if Microsoft wanted to do the porting work. Windows (and linux) would run without modification if someone came out with a console using x86 architecture. So would OSX actually. Given that the 360 runs a PowerPC CPU, I bet someone's already hacked OSX onto it.

 

OEM PCs are also fairly standard within their model lines. One Smell Computer CraptiPlex 2400 is pretty much identical to the next until the user changes something. And every single PC has the capability to connect to a TV right out of the box, especially now that VGA ports are commonplace on TVs.

[TheTerminator2004]

But that's the thing, PCs aren't standard. Some have nVidia GPUs, some have ATi, some have Intel. Some have Intel CPUs, some have AMD. Some are hyperthreaded, some arent. Some are single core, some 2, 3, 4 or even 6 cores. Some have 1gb memory, some 2, 3, 4, or even more. All of these make a massive difference, because different pieves of hardware work in different ways - coding a game to work the same on nVidia and ATI graphics cards is much harder than just programming for one or the other, for example.

 

And while PCs can connect to a TV, they aren't designed to, at least not in the same way as consoles. How many people do you know who have their PC in the living room by the TV, and play it sat on the sofa? Not many, because you need a desk for a keyboard and mouse. And trying to read the writing on the screen from a distance at high resolutions could pose problems.

 

Finally, from a developer's perspective, consoles and PC are even more different - consoles have licensing fees, restricted online access (such as MS charging for each patch or update a developer releases, or their restrictions on releasing free content - which is why people who own TF2 on 360 have to pay for all the updates), assessment procedures that have to be gone through, etc. Whereas on PC, developers can do whatever they want, as can users - it's all completely open.

[dthumb]

The only reason he's doing this is so he can get money for a subscription-based Call of Duty service.

A Call of Duty MMO with WOW type subscription to be precise.

CEO Robert Kotick talks of a Call of Duty subscription service

“We’ve heard that 60 per cent of [Microsoft’s] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call of Duty” It came from the horse's mouth, haha!

[JimboUK]

Both HP (Voodoo) and Dell (Alienware) already make gaming machines that can be connected to a TV should the owner want to, I'm not sure what he's going on about. Neither company is suddenly going to produce cheap machines capable of playing games, they'd undermine their own premium models. He seems to be under the impression that connecting any PC to a TV will magically turn it into a gaming machine, for someone who's head of a large game company he seems remarkably clueless.