These days everyone is trying hard to stand out from the crowd. CEO of Activision, Bobby Kotick, has some interesting ideas of his own on how to stand out. He wants to sell his Activision products as stand-alone games. Meaning no home console required. The idea would be that Guitar Hero, Band Hero, DJ Hero, Tony Hawk Ride and any other future peripheral based games from Activision would be sold as its own console. This would make Activision a platform as well as a game publisher. There are more negatives then positives to this idea how ever.
The obvious first problem is, what will the games run on? Without a console to run the games, Activision would have to develop and build their own mini console in order to play their games (which will probably come preloaded onto the system itself). This in turn would automatically raise the price of an already expensive peripheral game. The next issue is online connectivity. No console, again, means Activision would have to build their own network infrastructure to support any online play, download packs, or game patches. Once again, raising the price.
The social aspect is another flaw in Kotick’s brilliant plan. With no console, there is no connectivity what so ever to your friends on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. No trophies, no achievements, no cross game text/voice chat, no comparing scores against your friends, no reason what so ever for some people to even play the game in the first place.
Next is timing. As popular as Guitar Hero and Rock Band are, the overall sales and time spent on such games have been on a steady decline for months. If Kotick had implemented this idea 3 years ago it probably would have worked. But the games are getting stale, still expensive and very little is improved or more innovative from game to game.
Nice try Kotick. Back to the drawing board with you.
i dont think this is a good idea =/