Gabe Newell and Frank Pearce, co-founders of Valve and Blizzard, respectively, are of the opinion that a “unified online community” would be ideal.
Speaking to Develop, Newell said he would like the industry to “figure out how to make the internet better instead of figuring out how to keep customers off the internet”.
“One way is a dead end, the other creates more value,” he said, believing that Sony’s more open system may eventually influence others such as Microsoft to do the same as the process is “certainly technically feasible”
Pearce was unsure if such integration would ever become a reality, said he was hopeful more partnerships such as Sony’s with Valve and CCP would become commonplace.
“One of the things I look at when it comes to the modern games business, is that gamers today want to play whatever game experience they want, whenever they want with whomever they want,” he said. “So I think you’re going to see a lot of games experiences that get platform agnostic. Blizzard has to contemplate that.
“If you have a gaming experience on the PC that you want people to enjoy on the console you may have to adapt components of that experience to different platforms. So maybe that isn’t a level playing-field. Maybe some games are best as a shared community rather than a shared gameplay experience. It really is completely dependent on the game itself.
“A lot of guys in the office are passionate about the console space; people who have a lot of great ideas for interactive ideas in the console space. It’s definitely something we’ll revisit.”
Blizzard said back in August it was “looking for programmers, designers, artists who think their dream job would be to bring Diablo to the console,” but nothing has been confirmed at this time.
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