call-of-duty-mmo posts

While some PC gamers have their gaming rigs hooked up to their TV sets, most PC games are still played with a mouse and keyboard and with a small PC monitor. However Activision Blizzard's CEO Bobby Kotick says in a new interview that his company will "very aggressively" support efforts by PC companies to have more gaming PCs hooked up to TVs.

Of course, Kotick isn't doing this just because he's a big supporter of gaming on PCs. In a chat with the Financial Times (free registration required) Kotick states that the publishers get little money from the revenue streams that Microsoft charges for Xbox Live online service for the Xbox 360. He states, "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." He sees gaming PCs, with its more open network architechiture, as a way around it, stating, "If we are going to broaden our audiences, we are going to need to have other devices."

This brings up the idea, which has been reported before, that Kotick is looking to make a MMO based on the Call of Duty shooter franchise. Having a PC running such a game would allow Activision to control the pricing for playing the game online and reap the benefits directly if its successful.

When you have one of the biggest game launches in 2009, everyone wants to know what the team behind it wants to do next. On Thursday, rumors hit that Infinity Ward would not be making the next game in Activision's Modern Warfare series. Now comes word via Destructoid that Infinity Ward's next game could in fact be an MMO title.

As usual, the article cites unnamed sources for its info saying that the developer has been hiring people away from major MMO developer Sony Online Entertainment. The article also claims there's some kind of collaboration with Blizzard (both developers are owned by Activision Blizzard) on this project. The article claims not to know exactly what the MMO will be all about although Activision execs have mentioned the possibility of a Call of Duty-based MMO in the past.