THQ: New consoles would be "horrible"
"It's bad for everybody," says Bilson.
What if Sony and Microsoft were to turn around tomorrow and announce the arrival of PS4 and Xbox 720 within three years? For THQ core games boss Danny Bilson, that would be a disaster.
"It would be horrible," Bilson told Eurogamer in an exclusive interview published today. "But I think they all know our model's broken anyway.
"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?" he asked. "It's bad for everybody."
We're past merely understanding the consoles and on to being creative with them, Bilson argued. Look at World of Warcraft, he said - a game that bypassed face-melting graphics with stylised cartoon art and inventive content.
"Stability of technology allows for the fruition and the growth of creative," he declared. "We're not having to invest all of our focus, and, oh my god, how are we going to deal with that new technology? We understand it. We still have guys trying to squeeze it to do cooler stuff, but it puts the weight of the mission under creative, which ultimately should get us more interesting and more creative stuff.
"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. It is more important.
"As long as we're creatively satisfied as gamers by what we're getting, I'm really satisfied," he added. "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?"
THQ has big-league ambitions, and will hope to propel itself towards the EAs and Activisions of the publisher world with the arrival of Homefront, due 11th March.
After that, the publisher has a packed slate of heavy hitters: Red Faction: Armageddon, UFC, WWE, Dawn of War II: Retribution, Space Marine, Saints Row 3, de Blob 2, inSane, Devil's Third and Darksiders 2.
Eurogamer's full, make-or-break interview with Danny Bilson is live now.