In a recent interview with the Guardian, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick praised the new systems from platform holders Sony and Nintendo: the PlayStation Vita and the Wii U. He also talked about the difficulties each system has ahead of itself and the opportunities they present to Activision.
“There will always be a need for specialized hardware to satisfy the needs of gamers,” he replied when asked about growing competition from smartphones and tablets. “With the Wii U … from a development perspective, having a Nintendo device that is on parity with the other hardware from a graphics perspective was really necessary. For the kinds of games we create, it was becoming very difficult for us to support the Wii with the expectations that our gamers have.”
“I think that the user-interface itself is very clever – there will be a lot of innovation to come from having the second screen. It's also critically important that you can use the existing physical interfaces with the new device because those are really compelling. Nintendo has always done a very good job of thinking about the user experience and this is no exception,” said Kotick.
“Well, without telling you our title plans, it's now more possible to do deep rich multiplayer games – we need more clarity from Nintendo on the online capabilities, but we've had development systems for a while now and we're very enthusiastic about it.” he added.
Kotick is enthusiastic about the PlayStation Vita, but wonders if the market will respond to the system in a positive way.
“[The PlayStation Vita] is a fantastic piece of hardware. Technically, we're super excited about what we can do on it, it's really something incredible,” Kotick said. “The question is, where is the market? I think the pricing was surprisingly affordable, the product itself is really great – so the questions is, is there a need in the marketplace for a very specialised portable device of that capability? Hopefully there will be because it's a really nice product and its very well differentiated from what you can get in even the most capable smartphone or tablet today.”
