GamesBeat: This doesn’t sound like that Destiny is exclusive to Sony, though.
Hirshberg: No.
GamesBeat: It sounds like exclusives are becoming more creative these days. They used to be just that franchises like Final Fantasy never went to Microsoft.
Hirshberg: I think you still have both. You certainly saw both first parties announcing several pretty compelling exclusives, I thought. Both first parties had games that I would want to play and that you couldn’t play without their hardware. That’s a great strategy for their business. It’s not our business. Our business, we’ve always been platform agnostic. We always want to be wherever gamers are. That doesn’t mean we can’t do certainly things first or a little bit earlier – exclusives of the right scale, if you will – for a first-party partner. But we want to make sure we deliver a triple-A experience on every platform.
GamesBeat: Some of the things Microsoft’s talking more about include cloud processing. Do you know if you’ll jump into that?
Hirshberg: I don’t have any announcements or insight on that today. I will say, though, that particularly with Call of Duty, one of the competitive advantages we’ve had has been the back end technology that underpins that game that we’ve built with DemonWare. We’ve made sure that our matchmaking and multiplayer experience is something that we control, and that we can impact the quality of it. I don’t think that is going to change. That said, there are certainly some creative possibilities that they’ve described for cloud computing that our developers are surely going to explore.
GamesBeat: I’m still looking forward to seeing something take advantage of the new Kinect and the new Xbox 360 controller. Microsoft hasn’t really shown that yet.
Hirshberg: We have some things planned for the dog, in particular, in Call of Duty: Ghosts. Did you see the level we have with the dog? We have it running down in the theater. The idea of having the dog was born out of a narrative idea, but it really caught fire creatively when Infinity Ward brought in a Navy SEAL who’s an expert in training and working with these military dogs. When you hear how they work with these dogs and the equipment that they use, it was like a video game, built in. The dog wears a vest that has vibrating sensors. You can send commands to have it turn left, turn right, bark, hide, attack. It has a little microphone in its ear so you can talk to the dog. It has a pop-up camera on its harness so you can see what he’s seeing. We looked at this and it was practically all laid out for us. So the different ways that you can input suggestions to the dog will be really fun in Ghosts, and Kinect will be a part of it.
GamesBeat: These boxes that are around today are still pretty good: the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Do you think you’ll have more of a chance to have both be sustainable for a while?
Hirshberg: Yeah, but that wouldn’t be anything new. Look at the long tail that the PS2 had in the last console transition. That machine stayed relevant for years into the current generation. So that might happen again. The current boxes both deliver a lot of value. We want to make sure that we’re delivering a great experience on every platform. Whether you’re going to wait and see on the next generation and continue to play on the current hardware or whether you’re an early adopter, we want to make sure we’re there with the best possible experience on that platform.
GamesBeat: Are you satisfied at this point that the console makers have done enough to get everybody to upgrade and shift over at some point?
Hirshberg: Everybody? [Chuckles] I think there always early adopters in these transitions, the enthusiasts who can’t wait to try the new hardware. There are people who are going to wait and see. They’ll wait for the reviews or a good look at the content. They’ve put some compelling things on the table. Obviously it’s in our best interest to help make both of them successful.
GamesBeat: Is the livestream provider Twitch working to produce new players for you through live streaming?
Hirshberg: We’ve been an early adopter with Twitch as far as our podcasting, leagues, and e-sports element within Black Ops II. We had a push-button broadcast capability baked in [that game]. If you think about what was going in the world seven years ago, when the current generation of consoles was created—think about what wasn’t going on. The entire social media revolution, the entire smartphone revolution, all that. YouTube didn’t even exist. Those machines weren’t designed to deliver those things.
So a lot of the things that became creative ideas were inspired by what was happening in culture. They were force fits into the current hardware. Things like Call of Duty Elite, where we wanted to have a second screen that could do two-way communication with the game on the console. We had to do a lot of technological gymnastics to pull that off. Now the hardware’s being designed to be very conducive to those kinds of ideas. When we wanted to bake the ability to broadcast yourself through Twitch.tv into our game, we had to work around the technological obstacle course inside the current hardware. Now that kind of idea is built in.
Some of these things, I feel like we’re a bit ahead on. We have a head start. The next-gen hardware is going to make it easier and more seamless for us to deliver. And it’ll obviously open up new ideas.