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. Games are released across sev­eral plat­forms and the plat­forms that have the weak­est specs or the worst con­trols tend to get the watered down, crap­pier ver­sions of the games released.

Activi­sion, one of the lead­ing cross plat­form pub­lish­ers, wishes to move away from the “walled gar­dens” set by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

The pres­i­dent of Activi­son, Bobby Kotick, believes that the major­ity of peo­ple pay­ing to use XBL are pay­ing to play Mod­ern War­fare 2 — –Activi­sion does not get a share of that profit.

“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.”

While one might feel bad that activi­sion isn’t get­ting in on it’s “share” of the prof­its one does have to real­ize that it releases $15 dol­lar map­packs that it sells mil­lions of. Hav­ing said this it isn’t like Activi­sion is hurt­ing for money.

Kotick’s solu­tion is 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. Kotick stated that Activi­sion would “very aggres­sively” sup­port the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt of mak­ing an easy ‘plug-and-play’ PC that would hook up directly to the TV.

While I would love to see gam­ing return to the PC as a pri­mary gam­ing plat­form one does have to real­ize that their are some games that just play bet­ter on con­sole based sys­tems such as side scrollers, sports games, and party games. It’s very hard to use the PC as a party plat­form because a sin­gle unit does not pro­vide play access to 4 or more peo­ple simul­ta­ne­ously. If this issue could be addressed then it would make the PC more viable as a mass appeal plat­form. I hate play­ing games on any­thing other then a PC, espe­cially shoot­ers. One does have to real­ize, how­ever, that some games just play bet­ter on consoles.

Con­soles do pro­vide other ele­ments to devel­op­ers that make it eas­ier and cheaper to pro­duce games. Games made for con­soles have the exact same require­ments across the board for every­one play­ing so you only have to test the game on one sys­tem instead of 300 mil­lion dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions. Con­soles also have the ease of play fac­tor that you don’t get cur­rently with PC games and thats just putting the CD in and play­ing. Gen­er­ally with PC’s you have to install the game before you can play it and for those less knowl­edge­able this can be a real pain.