Gaming Trends Part 2: The State of PC Gaming

state-of-pc-cliff-mark-gears.jpg

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing quite a few themes that have been making their way through the industry. Throughout last week at GDC, many of these took center stage in a variety of forms. Today, we examine the state of PC Gaming.

Every year a multitude of publications come out proclaiming “PC gaming is dead! All units bail out!” It’s all getting to be a little ridiculous.

Now, let’s not be naive. PC gaming as we know it is in hot water and is very analogous to an arms race. Who’s going to be the first with a water-cooled, overclocked, dual-quad-SLi rig that can run Crysis at an insane resolution with every setting jacked to the point of no return? This is the disarray that Cliff Blizenski was speaking of when talking to Stephen Totilo of the MTV Multiplayer blog.

Arguably the biggest factor of the “disarray” that the PC is facing is piracy, which inadvertently causes more and more former big-time PC exclusive titles to make their way to consoles.

Go back two years, and I ‘m fairly certain that you’d be hard-pressed to find a hardcore PC gamer that wouldn’t scoff at the mere idea of Unreal Tournament or Command & Conquer making their way to a console.

This is the very reason that World of Warcraft and every Sims 2 expansion on the face of this earth has managed to stay at the top of the charts. Those are the games that are scaled back to the point that they will run on any computer released within the past 6 years, give or take a few.

The recent release of SteamWorks further solidifies Valve’s dedication to the PC as a viable platform and marks a milestone in PC gaming. SteamWorks consists of a wide variety of development tools that may be useful to developers of all sizes.

Fast-forward a few weeks and we’ll see Microsoft and Havok following suit. Microsoft unvieled the DreamSpark intiative, which makes a suite of Microsoft tools available for students. Not long after, Havok announced that they will be releasing Havok Complete, their solution to physics and animation in May 2008.

The big bullet point is that all of these companies have (or are in the process of) releasing these tools for free, effectively making it available and possible for anyone and everyone to make a game should they have the patience, drive, and dedication.

Through 2008, we may see PC gaming evolve into something we don’t recognize – and some of us may not like it.

For example, take Battlefield: Heroes. Although it’s very much an off-shoot of the Battlefield series as we know it, it makes a statement about the position that the PC market is in right now. For those that may not know, Battlefield: Heroes is a free-to-play online multiplayer FPS that will launch this summer.

The free-to-play model will work on two fronts, with advertising that EA is claiming wil be non-intrusive, along with content that may be paid for (nature of said content has yet to be revealed) that won’t severely cripple gamers that are playing for free.

The outcome of this ‘experiment’ may be indicative of the way that the PC gaming market will go in the forseeable future.

Please Recommend RipTen on Facebook

TAGS: , , , , ,

Related Articles

  • Krispy Demon

    I know that Sins of a Solar Empire is selling quite well, and Stardock claims that one of the reasons for this is that they make games that are playable on the “average” PC. Here is what they said on their website.

    “I saw an article at IGN about how PC developers are blaming piracy as the reason some high profile games aren’t selling in the quantities they should. As some of you know, Stardock’s “main” business is in the PC software realm so we have a bit different outlook on market dynamics. Here’s the deal: Piracy is a problem, no doubt about it. It does cost sales. But it isn’t the driving reason for lost sales, it’s the size of the market. Sins of a Solar Empire is outselling some higher profile games not just because it’s a “great game” but because it runs on a vastly larger number of PCs.

    For console advocates out there, ask yourself how well a given game would sell if it required players to run out and buy a $300 upgrade to their console to play the game? That’s essentially what a lot of high profile PC game developers expect. When Ironclad and Stardock were working on Sins, we made a conscious decision that the game would not require potential gamers to upgrade their systems. That meant we couldn’t have things like moving turrets or whatever but it means that the size of the market was much larger. No matter how good your game is, if people can’t play it, you will always be limited. The number of people willing to upgrade PCs for games is not that large. If you want to sell lots of copies of your PC game, make sure it runs on a lot of machines.”

    I don’t have a lot of Stardock’s sales figures or anything, but GalCiv 2 sold quite well, and SoaSE is selling quite well also, which is strange if piracy is the big issue killing PC games since Stardock’s games have NO copy protection and don’t even require a CD to be in the drive to play. The only thing most of their game require is the CD key to play games over the internet. I don’t even think you need the CD key to install the thing, but I could be wrong. Either way, it’s tons better than having some glorified spyware installed on my computer and screwing up my registry.

    Frankly, I think they have a point. Piracy is an issue to a certain extent, but to blame the PC sales figures on that is like blaming GTA for the Columbine shootings. The problem is the developers themselves thinking that they have to constantly push the limits. It’s partially our fault also because gamers tend to only really pay attention to new games that “look” awesome, but obviously that isn’t everything. I know I don’t have the money to upgrade my PC, and that means I can’t play some games. Buy the time I can afford a PC that can run something like Crysis, something else will have come along that pushes things even further.

    As far as the free games thing, I don’t know how far that will go, but I guess it all depends on who does it and how it’s supported. If EA does it, it probably won’t do to well as they’ll milk the hell out of it. I can see it being a viable way to combat piracy, but as I stated, I don’t think that’s the biggest issue harming the PC gaming world. As far as ad-supported games, I don’t see a problem with this at all. I think games that take it too far will not be taken seriously and will fail. I mean, movies do it all the time and most of the time people don’t even notice, and games could be the same way. I mean, a boxing game with matches sponsored by Dodge or Burger King makes sense, more so than fictitious sponsors. On the other hand, I don’t want to be playing Fable and have the heal potions be Mt. Dews. The problem I have now is that some games have ads in them now but cost the same as something else that doesn’t. Why should Rainbow Six cost the same as Halo if Vegas has ads for AXE deodorant bodyspray and Dodge all over the place, and Halo doesn’t? I’m fine with devs using ads to cut their bottom line, but it’d be nice if I saw something from that besides updates that changed movie posters from something Smokin’ Aces to Shoot ‘Em Up.