Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick sees his company's games one day bypassing consoles altogether. Speaking at the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference in San Francisco [thanks GameSpot], he specifically cited Guitar Hero: "I think what the untethered Guitar Hero does is equal the playing field a little more and give you some leverage with first parties when it comes to downloadable content and the business model."
He added that we should "expect many of our products to be playable independent of a console." Kotick said he's been been impressed with 1080p TVs that let users stream content from their PCs and offer other media hub functionality. Cloud computing services like OnLive or Gaikai could certainly help Kotick with his vision of Activision games without a console too.
On the Guitar Hero front, Kotick also advocated better support of social networking features, such as players' Facebook profiles being integrated into the game, enabling Activision's consumer base to post high scores on their profile page, share songs, etc. We have a feeling we'll be seeing this come to Guitar Hero 6, if not sooner. And with Facebook coming to Xbox Live it would make perfect sense.
