Today, we live in a multiplatform world. Many games that hit the PlayStation 3 are also on the Xbox 360, and some of those even make it to the PC. Due to hardware constraints, the Wii may get a watered down version of the software.
Activision, one of the leading cross platform publishers, wishes to move away from the "walled gardens" set by the likes of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
Bobby Kotick, Activision CEO, told the Financial Times that it believes that the majority of Xbox Live subscribers pay Microsoft for the Xbox 360 online service just to play Modern Warfare – a subscription fee that Activision doesn't get any share of.
"We've heard that 60 per cent of [Microsoft's] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call of Duty," Kotick told FT. "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."
Of course, Activision has still made a tidy sum from the sales of Modern Warfare 2 and the $15 map packs that it inevitably sells millions of.
Kotick's solution to this is simply 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. He added that Activision would "very aggressively" support the likes of HP and Dell in any effort of making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV.
(via GameSpot.)
