MG: Here’s the background of this project. Microsoft Xbox, PS3, Wii are all going to fail. They will become out of date. One day you won’t use these boxes to play games. It may be 2 years from now, it may be 7 years from now, but it’s in that time frame. That’s not all bad from Activisions point of view, because we make games..we call it being platform agnostic..so when we make the game we make it work on every platform whether it be PC, PS, Xbox or Wii. That way we reach more consumers and our R&D investment in the game and marketing investment can be spread across a larger user base. That’s the good news. The bad news is we have to pay what we call first party royalties. We have to pay Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo somewhere between $7-$10 per game we sell. If these boxes become out of date, yet people can still play our games, that’s not all bad. We don’t care how our games get to consumers, they just have to get there. More recently, there has been a lot of discussion about connected TVs and there is a lot of different people working all through the industries to create that vision. Most recently and probably the highest profile has been Google TV. With the advent of Google TV…eventually there will be a system where your living room TV is your computer. At least one of your computers. HP and Dell are also working these initiatives…other cable providers too. Everyone wants to be the owner of the TV and the channel through which the content arrives. Gaming will be no exception. There’s already a couple of companies that have started up, one is called ONLIVE, that’s basically a company that runs a bunch of servers and allows you to play games on your connected TV through the cloud so basically you can send commands thru the interent to the servers where the game is actually played and back down to ur TV. The problem right and for quite a long time because of the technology..theres too much lag to play a COD-like game. You may be able to play simple games…There’s a lot of energy in all different directions to bypass the Xbox and Play Station. So what we’d like to do is think of a world where there is no Xbox. And imagine that you can play COD with the technical specs of latency that you need to play the game and that means a PC wired into your TV. So if you try to go wireless and you try to go server cloud, the latency technology is not quite there yet. So imagine you’re wired into your TV. Well one thing that we need to do is we need to give the consumer and excellent playing experience on CoD. The way I’ve imagined it is a min, a target, and stretch of what this project should deliver. At a minimum we should have a controller that just as good as the Xbox controller. So if y ou plug a PC into your TV and you play the PC version of COD, you should be able to have a controller that works as well as playing through XBoX. And that means that the controller does have to be wireless. There are some controllers that you can buy in the store today, they’re almost all wired to the PC.
JN: We’ve looked at that. We went to Fry’s (electronic store) to get some tools.
RM: So what we saw was the exact replica Xbox360 controller that’s wired into your PC
MG: Right, Right. SO that’s for starters that’s the bare minimum, it’s got to be wireless and deliver an excellent experience. And if Dell or HP or Google through more process power through their GoogleTV over time..whatever the vehicle is that delivers the game, you have to be able to play it. That’s the bare minimum. It cannot be a step back from Xbox. And it’s not as easy as it sounds because the controllers are a bit different in the PC version of the game. So you’ve got to be able to map the controllers and have a seamless experience.
Now the real target is come up with a controller that is superior. So when gamers get it in their hands they’re like “wow, this is so cool” and if it’s that cool then even before all this maybe we could integrate the controller with our next game and say this is a step forward in consumer experience and innovation. I don’t know what that looks like, that’s why you’re here. I can tell you that everyone’s first thought is “oh, we’ll make a gun.” And I don’t necessarily want to discourage that, but a lot of people have tried making guns and it’s not that fun. It seems like it should be but it’s hard to aim.
JN: You’ve got to think about the walking.
MG: Yeah, you got to think about the walking. So the guns are, I would say, if you don’t think of guns, it wouldn’t bother me a bit, but if you do, don’t only think about guns. It ends up being initially intuitive, but in the end difficult. Some innovation in the controller where you can play this game and it’s just a step up in experience and fun. Then the stretch part of this project…Okay, full stop on CoD. Let’s talk WoW. Well WoW, if you know the game can only be played on the PC today. Not available on Xbox. Its very twitchy. You need to use a lot of keys on the keyboard and the mouse. But if there was a way to bring that experience to the living room couch, that could be a huge breakthrough for that game. People have thought about it. Well the instinct is: let’s bring the keyboard and the mouse on the couch and you’ve got a tray with the keyboard and mouse, but that’s hard. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if there’s a solution to this and that’s why it’s a stretch. But if there was a way to give people a great quality and it doesn’t even have to be better, just a great quality WoW experience w/o being on a hard surface with a keyboard and mouse, that would be fantastic.
RM: Do you also want the controller, let’s say for CoD, to have browsing capabilities on your Internet TV? Like you can browse the internet and type messages with your controller.
MG: No, that’s beyond the scope. If you want to build that in it’s fine, but that’s beyond the scope. And I think to be visionary for a minute if you think of Google TV as the first serious thought about integrating the computer and the TV…their vision is that they’re going to have an app store on the TV and you’ll be able to buy simple games, but googletv as it is today has some RAM, doesn’t have a hard drive, doesn’t have a lot of processesing capabilities, so the games they’re envisioning now will be very simplistic. If you fast-forward a year or two, if they were successful in establishing an installed base of GoogleTv it’s not hard to imagine that they could build processing power and could build some kind of flash harddrive and that over a relativiley brief period of time it’s possible to imagine that you could house a game like CoD on GoogleTV and it would become downloadable onto a harddrive and become seamlessly playable. It’s not that crazy to think that it’s not that far off. Things like this will transform the gaming experience.
RM: Another question, when we’re designing our product, we’re going under the assumption that we’re kind of in the future and these consoles are already becoming obsolete. Because one of our main issues…we’ve been talking to current players..and we were kind of under the assumption right now that we were in the present time and we’re trying to convert people from the Xbox to the PC. We’ve found a lot of resistance in that. Hardcore Xbox gamers really have no main reason to switch to the PC at the moment.
JN: We were thinking about the switch I guess from our talk with Mark Schar and yeah there is a lot of resistance.
RM: It would make it a lot easier for us if we’re under the assumption that Xbox is kind of becoming out of date.
MG: Yeah I think you can make that assumption. I think that, first of all, that is the basis for this project. And you have to assume that there is a PC driven Cod game that is connected directly to the television so you don’t have latency issues. For now you can use a regular PC, in the future it wont look like a PC, but it’ll act like a PC. Now having said all that, if you really do deliver something very exciting with the target part of this project, which is the step forward in innovation, it’s possible that we could get people to switch to the PC version of the game. It’s also possible in the short term that we could retrofit that and have it work for xbox. But I think we could simplify it and get back to the basis of the project to begin with, think of it in the future state.
JN: With that controller will we require it to work with other games as well?
MG: Focus on CoD. If it can work on CoD, it can be retrofitted to work on anything. It’s always easier and more effective to narrow the scope of a project.
JN: So I guess our target user wouldn’t be what Mark Schar said.
MG: I think your target user could be an Xbox360 user. But when you get feedback from them, you’re going to have to plant in their minds: “what if the xbox were gone” how would you feel about this gameplay?
RM: Do think we should specifically target hardcore CoD players or should we also go casual and across the spectrum.
MG: it’s a good question. There are about 25 million people who buy CoD every year around the world. I would say maybe 10 million are pretty hardcore and the other 15 are much more casual. It’s probably best to focus somewhat on the hardcore because that’s the torture test. If you satisfy them, the rest will come.
JN: Mark Schar mentioned that there were other products or designs that you guys have considerd in FPS. Was that the gun?
MG: Yes, the gun was the primary one.
JN: And they mostly failed?
MG: Yeah. Two things. One, it’s tiring after a while. And second, It’s hard to aim. Small movements on the gun 10 feet away create large movement on the screen.
JN: jack says some stuff about time crisis.
JN: I think we had a lot of questions without the assumption users will…..they chose xbox because of latency, players hack.
MG:…right, right, and there’s an excellent player matching system.
RM: up until this point we were thinking about how to convert people from xbox to pc and our project is really kind of an ergonomic issue. And right now it seems that people do not chose xbox over pc because of ergonomic issues, it’s because of latency issues, widespread hacking on PC, things like that…so I think this talk has clarified a lot and helps.
MG: Well, HP for example is working on a project where they will connect your PC wirelessly to you TV and they’re trying to do what GoogleTV is doing but in a different way. They are trying to come up with a system where sitting in your living room you can access your PC which is in another room. And do everything that you would do on a PC – browse, play games and so forth. And the problem with that from a CoD perspective is the latency. Even being wireless from 30 feet away…it creates latency that’s too large for gameplay. So you have to assume that this will either be solved over time with technology. Or the solutions that will advance first are the ones that are hardwired in. so that way you can simplify your life by just saying “hardwire a PC into a TV and play the game.”
JN: And so there’s a new COD: Black Ops coming out?
MG: November 9th
JN: SO that’s like the next MW. SO I guess MW2 will become obsolete?
MG: Well there will still be some people that play it.
JN: But most people will have converted.
MG: Yes, most people will, but it doesn’t really matter. I can get you the Black Ops. Honestly, it’s not even done yet..they’re still de-bugging it. Honestly it doesn’t even matter which one you choose. All the mechanics will be the same. They will all have some like. Even though MW2 will take a back-seat, it still be played for a few more years.
JN: and we don’t have to consider the features within the game itself…mainly on the controller, the user experience.
MG: Yeah, you just need to make sure that whatever works with the controller and the Xbox works with your solution.
JN: I think we may the PC version.
MG: Yeah, I can get that for you.
JN: That’d be great.
RM: Yeah we were actually gonna ask you …we have our project budget for the whole year and we were wondering what we should buy and what things you could provide in terms of software.
MG: I can get you some copies of the PC game..and that would be no issue. If you need a computer of something you should take that out of your budget.
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