Activision’s Bobby Kotick has come out today and said that they are looking to make many of their properties playable independent of a console. This has been reported pretty widely, I’ll credit it to Kotaku .

I’m torn about this. On the one hand I fully expect him to come out tomorrow and clarify his statement, because I can only think he means that they will focus on making their properties playable universally over whatever people are using to play games. But this is what Activision already loves them some multi-format releases, and I’ve come to believe that ol’ Bobby is on the wrong side of crazy. So what if it his statement means so something else?

Kotaku points to services to onLive as a possible answer, to which I say /raspberry. I live in Australia where onLive might be feasible in 2122 given our ate of broadband progression. It’s also the only other option I can think of to releasing games dependent on in home hardware. But are Activision nutty enough to really go down the track of something like hosted software. Outside of the bandwidth problem, I just don’t think the wider public are savvy enough to understand SaaS type situations. And given that I can barely get my home network set up right and I work in the online space every day I don’t think it’s safe to assume that your average Joe that wants to play him some call of duty is going to be able to optimise his network for something like onLive.

But it’s more than that, the nebulous console wars drum up a rather large but of hype. The brand equity of the Xbox or Playstation is far greater than 90% of the games those systems play. And this is all because of the contest that exists between those 2, they both out there marketing themselves. In the process they are also marketing those big games they can be used to play. If you only have one magic box on which everything can be played, it’s safe to assume that a lot more of the marketing push would be reliant on the game publishers themselves.

So while there are cost savings to be had, I think there are a lot of dangers in doing something like this. I know this wouldn’t be an on\off kind of thing, there would be a transition period. I Also don’t see that transition period happening any time soon. Still, there is something to be said for holding the thing you own in you hand, or to having a shiny wonder box in your living room. There’s also the issue of choice, both for the consumer and the developer, and choice is always a good thing. After all, choice is what drives the market.