Kotick: "We are going to need to have other devices"

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has claimed the publisher is looking to expand its remit beyond consoles, hoping to reach gamers on its own terms.

Speaking to the Financial Times last week, Kotick hinted that Activision may now seek to push its games towards PC, on its own networks.

"We’ve heard that 60 per cent of subscribers are principally on Live because of Call of Duty," he said, referring to reports that 1.7 billion hours were spent in those games' online modes between November and April.

"We don’t really participate financially in that income stream. 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 talked instead of a new breed of online gaming PCs that connect easily to a television, saying that Activision will "very aggressively" aid new programmes by the likes of HP and Dell to promote these.

Last month, it was revealed that only 30 per cent of Activision's revenue came from console games, with World of Warcraft being the major provider.

"We have always been platform agnostic," says Mr Kotick. "[Consoles] do a very good job of supporting the gamer. If we are going to broaden our audiences, we are going to need to have other devices."

Kotick has previously stated that he hopes to introduce subscription models to Call of Duty. These latest statements may suggest those plans are gathering steam.