If Activision Blizzard CEO, Bobby Kotick, has his way, a future generation of television-compatible PCs could, perhaps, provide a viable alternative to a videogame consoles, according to a report by the Financial Times.
In comments related to discussing the subscription revenue enjoyed by Microsoft for Xbox Live, and Activision’s desire to run their own suscription-based service for franchises like Call of Duty, Kotick revealed that he believes the gateway to this goal could be expanding the scope of PCs with regard to gaming, given the open nature of the platform.
“We’ve heard that 60 per cent of Microsoft’s subscribers are principally on Live because of Call of Duty,” Kotick commented. “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.”
The Blizzard-developed World of WarCraft is presently a major source of subscription-based revenue for the company, so it’s easy to understand why Kotick, an outspoken proponent of subscription-based payment models, is keen to replicate this success with his company’s other franchises. One step toward this goal, he says, will be to “very aggressively” support efforts by Dell and HP to connect PCs to televisions, with the help of “gamer friendly” PCs built for this purpose.
“We have always been platform agnostic,” he continued. “Consoles do a very good job of supporting the gamer. If we are going to broaden our audiences, we are going to need to have other devices.”
