Bilson: New consoles ‘would be horrible’

THQ head of core games Danny Bilson has said that the arrival of a new generation of games consoles in the near-future would present a series of unpleasant issues for developers.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Bilson said that new consoles from the major hardware developers “would be horrible”.

“But I think they all know our model’s broken anyway,” he said.

"It still costs us a fortune to make games on this platform. If they’re going to up the scale, up the art, up the content, I don’t know how to make that and sell it to anybody for under $100 a game.

"Who wants to do that? It’s bad for everybody."

Bilson cited the ability for developers to be increasingly creative on a stable platform set as a further reason for maintaining the current console generation.

“I just started playing Cataclysm,” he said.

“I had been away from WOW for maybe a year. I went back in and my first thing was, oh, the graphics are old, but then it’s like, who cares when the creative and the content is great?

"That’s the trick. We’re not going to get beat by another hardware upgrade like every five years like it was before. There will be little things. It’s up to us to compete in graphics and creativity. Sometimes I hope good creativity and style will be able to be more important.”

Perhaps hinting at the direction he intends to take future THQ titles in, Bilson then described creative satisfaction as his main desire in both playing and developing titles.

"As long as we’re creatively satisfied as gamers by what we’re getting, I’m really satisfied," he said.

"I still see cooler stuff, better stuff. So much is in the software engineering and working with the technology. I look at games and I go, wow, how did they get such great characters?”