DRM News

In an interview with the Financial Times (account may be needed to read), Activision CEO Bobby Kotick talked about being unhappy with the fact that Activision doesn’t make any money from Xbox Live subscriptions, despite it’s Call of Duty series being some of the most popular games on the service.

“We’ve heard that 60 per cent of [Microsoft’s] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call of Duty,” says Mr 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.”

Since there isn’t much he (or the company) can do about that, he mused a bit about perhaps making the PC market a bigger piece of the company’s focus.

Mr Kotick sees an opportunity to break the consoles’ “walled gardens with new gamer-friendly PCs, designed to be plugged into the television. PCs have long been used for online play, but PC gaming remains niche when the games industry needs to widen its appeal.

“We have always been platform agnostic,” says Mr Kotick. “[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.”

Activision will “very aggressively” support efforts by Dell and HP to connect PCs to TVs.

Now, on the surface this sounds great for PC gamers. Here we have the top guy at one of the biggest publishers speaking out in support of the platform. And yet, considering that it all started with an expression of frustration that Activision can’t monetize multiplayer on the console, one has to wonder what exactly is providing the motivation to looking back at the PC. Could it perhaps be to ‘provide much more value’ to PC gamers via some sort of subscription service for Activision titles, something that has been mused at before with stated desires to sell a subscription model Call of Duty?