medicnick83
Paramedic
IGN published the following article... it's a good read.
I've been playing video games for around thirty years now, from first playing Adventure on my neighbor's Atari 2600 to recently plowing my way through Assassin's Creed 2 on my 360. And though I've been a fan of most of the gaming systems that have come and gone along the way -- from arcade cabinets to handhelds to the living room consoles -- but my truest gaming love is and has always been the PC.
It makes me unique here at IGN. While most of the editors have long-lasting love of video games, I'm the only one who's still playing most of his games on the same platform we were all using to play Populous, SimCity and Prince of Persia back in 1989. Sure, I've switched out hardware year-by-year and replaced entire machines outright, but all along the way I've been consistently encouraged, enlightened and entertained by the PC catalog. As we move into 2010, the entire gaming industry is in the midst of some interesting shifts that will have a profound impact on the PC. Whether or not those changes are positive or negative will depend not only on the efforts of publishers and developers but also on our own expectations.
Over the last decade or so, the PC has seen some of its core strengths absorbed or challenged by the compromises of cross-platform development and the realities of a tougher economic climate. The democratic development environment usually associated with the PC has spurred much of the creativity in the industry, from the creation and preservation of entire genres to the development of hardware and software formats that make developing and sharing content easier across all platforms.
We've often joked that the greatest strength and weakness of the PC is that anyone can make a game. It's a strength because there are no limits based on what a publisher will or won't approve, either with regard to content or genre pigeonholes. It's a weakness because the glut of poor titles encourages publishers to cling to established franchises and merely iterate on the successes of the previous year. Interestingly, we're seeing Xbox Live Arcade and the iPhone open the doors for greater creativity outside of the traditional PC development arena, but the sky is still truly the limit for the makers of PC games.
That's sometimes at odds with the mass-market mentality that tends to knock the rough edges off of most console games, a mentality that has tremendous significance depending on your individual perspective. PC gamers sometimes complain about the "dumbing down" of the PC catalog and point to a particular franchise's new console direction as the reason for lowered expectations in the PC marketplace. I've been guilty of it myself, particularly with regard to franchises that I really enjoyed, like MechWarrior or Rainbow Six. Yes, the streamlining of these and other franchises is a consequence of adapting to the consoles' limited controller options, but it also reflects a more important trend that has publishers and developers reaching for broader markets.
The difference between the console and PC markets is kind of like the difference between network and cable TV. NCIS and Dancing with the Stars will always have more mass appeal than Iron Chef or SpongeBob simply because they're designed and positioned to attract a larger demographic. But the specific appeal of the cable show is in finding a smaller niche or an underserved segment of the market and delivering the content they're not able to get from the major networks. The mass-market games like Madden or Street Fighter or Mario are a great fit for the consoles, but I don't think that the most profitable future for PC games is in trying to adopt that same mentality. To the extent that the PC catalog reflects this thinking, it fails to serve the individual gamers who want their war games, racing sims, or sports management titles to have a depth of detail that only the most hardcore can appreciate.
It's often perceived as a necessity on the console side to make a particular game as appealing as possible to every person who owns a console. The problem is that game publishers have let that thinking creep over into the PC market so now the development and marketing is driven by a need to make a single game that suits everyone. We see it all the time in the dreaded promise of all press releases that a game "will appeal to casual and hardcore players alike." (And if it's a licensed game, this is usually followed by the equally obnoxious claim that it will please both "fans and newcomers.") It's time to stop making such ridiculous claims, and more than that, to stop letting them be the sole consideration that determines how games are made and which ones get published, particularly on the PC.
I'm not saying that PC games have to aim for obscurity. Games like The Sims and World of Warcraft have proven that PC can enjoy as much mass-market appeal as any title on the consoles. But neither game earned its success through the traditional release model. Both rode waves of tremendous post-release support, found ways to generate cash far beyond the initial retail purchase, and leveraged the unique strengths of the PC in a way that simply wouldn't have been possible in a console format.
Is it naive to hope for a return to the days of the 1990s when a developer could sell 80,000 copies of a game and still consider itself successful enough to stay in business long enough to make another game? Obviously part of the problem is the skyrocketing development budgets, but as games like Plants vs. Zombies or AudioSurf proved, concept and design are still the main drivers of popularity. The digital publishing revolution is making things a bit easier, but we still need to tackle the harmful expectations that anything less than a blockbuster is an outright failure. It's a sad result of the mass-market mentality that Gears of War can be looked on with pity because it's only the tenth most popular game on Xbox Live. If I made the tenth most popular game on Xbox Live, I'd get a tattoo.
None of this is intended to judge the success or approach of console games. I play them and I love them but I think the assumption that PC and console games are equivalent discourages innovation and risk across both platforms. And though we might get a little territorial because of the migration of FPS games to the console, we can't put the blame for every crappy PC FPS on developers who strive to meet the tastes of the console audience.
Strategy is one genre that the PC has a firm lock on, and I think it's precisely because it requires a complexity in terms of control schemes and details that's not always adaptable to a console environment. That's not to discount Advance Wars or Pikmin's success within the console framework, but aside from EA and Gas Powered Games, few companies have made any serious attempts to create a format that allows a developer to design a game that works equally well for both audiences and both control schemes. Unlike the FPS, where the fundamental presentation and interactions aren't that different from console to PC, strategy games seem to face more significant cross-platform hurdles.
The same is true of MMOs, which face the additional hurdles of a console manufacturer's bandwidth restrictions and revenue sharing requirements, both of which seriously impact a developer's ability to publish content and profit from it. MMOs like World of Warcraft exist on the PC because of the unique economic and technical flexibility of the PC platform, and it's obvious that, outside of Sony's internal projects The Agency and DC Universe, there aren't many companies who are attempting to challenge the PC's dominance in this area.
In fact, if you look at the most popular PC exclusives coming up in the near future, you're talking about RTS games and MMOs. Games like StarCraft 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic can go head to head with any other title in the catalog in terms of visibility and expectation. We may have cause to complain about the genre overload here, but both games are doing well because they succeed in delivering on what the PC does best in terms of interactivity, connectivity and capacity. Would those games be as vital if they were adjusted to meet the expectations and demands of the console market?
Naturally, cross-platform success allows developers to keep making better games, which is a definite benefit to the industry. But I think publishers, developers and gamers all need to adjust their expectations about what constitutes success and whether or not we want games to be equivalent across all platforms. If we start assuming that we have to make games that appeal to everyone, we're destined to lose the unique qualities that make PC gaming so vital and attractive.
Personally, I don't want a game that anyone can play; I want a game that meets me where I am. The PC has been doing a pretty good job of that for the last twenty years and I hope it continues for twenty more.
