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For your information, the answer is "no"...I wasn't sarcastic enough in my "sniper" post, so I thought I'd continue in the title of this one.
However, given the huge number of folks telling me to go read Bobby Kotick's article in the Financial Times today, maybe I should not be so sarcastic:
Source
Activision claimed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the biggest entertainment launch to date when it was released last November. And eight months later, gamers are still avidly gunning down Russian terrorists and Afghan insurgents.
You might expect the boss of the company behind the world’s most popular video game to be happy. But when it comes to Call of Duty, Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, feels he is missing out.
Apparently, Bobby K., feeling the pinch to eek out some more profit for his shareholders, has decided that now is the time to squeeze Microsoft for a piece of the XBox Live action. According to the head of Activision, Microsoft's approximately sixty percent of the people who subscribe to XBox Live do it because they play Call of Duty.
We’ve heard that 60 percent of subscribers are principally
on Live because of Call Of Duty,” said Kotick. “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.”
A year ago or saw Kotick was sticking out his "Cod via-subscription" jab. Now, we finally see the right hook.
I must admit though, this took me by surprise as I thought the subscription would be through some Microsoft intermediary. Now I realize that perhaps Activision wants to cut out the middle man altogether and simply provide us with their own little play-for-pay environment.
In fact...and this is the interesting part for PC gamers...Bobby is talking to PC manufacturer's like Dell and HP in the hopes of getting some energy behind TV-ready PC's. TV's these days are as good or better than most computer monitors, so I suppose that seems very technically do-able.
This angle is well explained in CVG today (thanks to Crayfish for the link).
Does that mean that in the near future the lowly PC's place will rise substantially within the Activision platform -- maybe even eclipsing the console?
For all us right-thinking PC guys, that's already a no-brainer. I say again, a mouse is the only way one should be playing FPS games and therefore a cheap gaming PC hooked up to your HD TV would be awesome.
But looking at the economics, will most households get both an XBox live subscription and then, just to play CoD, a TV-ready PC?
I don't think so, or am I missing something here?
More likely, this is some type of Byzantine bargaining move by Activision to scare Microsoft into giving them a "taste" of the receipts for XBox Live. If CoD is truly bringing in 60% of the players, then I certainly think that the FPS franchise deserves their due.
Nevertheless, I'm just going to sit back and fantasize the re-birth of the gaming PC for just a second. Ya...that'd be cooooool.
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