Activision wishes to abolish consoles, migrate entirely to PC

[Humodour]

The site is unquotable. Horrible formatting when I try to C+P, but the site itself looks fine.

 

"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

Edited July 8, 2010 by Krezack

[Calax]

*waits for the inevitable rage spewing machine that is the internet vs kotick*

[Humodour]

To be fair, Kotick is a ****. However, **** or not, any efforts on Activision's part to eliminate the console market and broaden the PC one will have repercussions.

 

Interestingly, Electronic Arts (EA) thinks the same way:

 

"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible," said EA's head of international publishing.

 

He said the web and set-top boxes would grow in importance to the industry.

 

"We're platform agnostic and we definitely don't want to have one platform which is a walled garden," said Mr Florin.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7052420.stm

 

Consider this: you've essentially got the 4 biggest names in the industry swinging their weight behind the PC market: Blizzard, Valve, and now Electronic Arts and Activision.

[WorstUsernameEver]

Heh, I'll discuss about it when I'll see facts.

For now it's all talk, and the console market is still the dominant one.

[Syraxis]

[Activision CEO Bobby] Kotick

[heathen]

What they want is essentially a console without Sony or MS or Nintendo to pay royalties or license fees to. This is only natural for big publishers, they don't want to share any profits with anyone. This would be a good move, but one fueled by greed, nothing less nothing more. It's still be a walled garden though, just one where publishers have more power.

Edited July 8, 2010 by heathen

[Mamoulian War]

To be fair, Kotick is a ****. However, **** or not, any efforts on Activision's part to eliminate the console market and broaden the PC one will have repercussions.

 

Interestingly, Electronic Arts (EA) thinks the same way:

 

"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible," said EA's head of international publishing.

 

He said the web and set-top boxes would grow in importance to the industry.

 

"We're platform agnostic and we definitely don't want to have one platform which is a walled garden," said Mr Florin.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7052420.stm

 

Consider this: you've essentially got the 4 biggest names in the industry swinging their weight behind the PC market: Blizzard, Valve, and now Electronic Arts and Activision.

 

I would say more that EA is more interested in a platform like OnLive, than PC gaming

[Humodour]

Not unless they can get the lag from OnLive below 200ms.

[Bos_hybrid]

[Activision CEO Bobby] Kotick

[Mamoulian War]

Not unless they can get the lag from OnLive below 200ms.

 

they dont care about lag, they care about lower costs of development, no or very low royalties, and monthly fee from the service

[Wrath of Dagon]

What Kotick is really saying is he'd like to be able to charge you subscription for playing COD online. It's not that they love PC piracy.

 

Edit: What they really want to kill are not consoles, but single player games. They want everything online, to prevent piracy and get recurring revenue from subscriptions, the Holy Grail of the game publishers.

Edited July 8, 2010 by Wrath of Dagon

[Purkake]

Kotick's crazy ramblings brought to you by Activision inc.

 

Not unless they can get the lag from OnLive below 200ms.

Actually, speaking of OnLive, they have a limited beta thing going and I've heard from a few people that it is actually playable without any more noticeable lag than normal online gaming. The bigger problem is really the fact that you actually have to buy all the games ala Steam before you can play them via OnLive in addition to a subscription fee.

 

Not that it's coming to Australia anytime soon, but looks like the thing actually works.

Edited July 8, 2010 by Purkake

[Mamoulian War]

I think, this is a proper time to link this

 

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessag...topic_id=128252

[Morgoth]

Maybe I'm nuts but I'd gladly pay even 100

[Mera]

Maybe I'm nuts but I'd gladly pay even 100

[Morgoth]

They're the last bastion of quality PC games.

...

I'm serious. Or do you know any other developer (Firaxis maybe) that puts so much time, polish and love into their PC games?

[mkreku]

Piranha Bytes :D

[Bos_hybrid]

Piranha Bytes :D

 

Gothic 3.(polish)

Edited July 8, 2010 by Bos_hybrid

[Kaftan Barlast]

All yall console biatches need to man up and realize yo **** is done, yo.

[WorstUsernameEver]

Piranha Bytes :D

 

Gothic 3.(polish)

 

Well, Risen was pretty polished. Not on the level of truly AAA games, but it was a step up before their Gothic games.

Of course, comparing Pyranha Bytes to Valve or Blizzard...

[Purkake]

I agree on Valve and Blizzard, they are the only ones that have been consistently releasing quality polished games.

[vault_overseer]

Kotick's crazy ramblings brought to you by Activision inc.

 

Not unless they can get the lag from OnLive below 200ms.

Actually, speaking of OnLive, they have a limited beta thing going and I've heard from a few people that it is actually playable without any more noticeable lag than normal online gaming. The bigger problem is really the fact that you actually have to buy all the games ala Steam before you can play them via OnLive in addition to a subscription fee.

 

Not that it's coming to Australia anytime soon, but looks like the thing actually works.

Digital Foundry ran teir tests and established that on 25mbps FiOs connection, you can expect anywhere between 150 to 216 ms lag.

Edited July 8, 2010 by vault_overseer

[Purkake]

Interesting, but it's still much better than what I thought when I first heard about it.

 

The technology has potential.

[Mamoulian War]

Interesting, but it's still much better than what I thought when I first heard about it.

 

The technology has potential.

 

And it is much worse than i have thought ... average latency of ~180ms on 25Mbps Fibers??? Don't make me laugh...

[vault_overseer]

Interesting, but it's still much better than what I thought when I first heard about it.

 

The technology has potential.

 

I don't think so - it's missing scalability. They still have to run each game session on a dedicated CPU and GPU(imagine the power budget for a 100k machine server farm with high performance GPUs), which still need to be upgraded regularly. And on top of that, noone has seen him cope with ridiculous bandwidth demands that mass adoption would bring.

 

I'm very very skeptical. It's a good idea and they got some tech done. But visualization is not there yet.