More PC Gaming Is Dead
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- The business model for PC games is evolving from packaged goods to a download model. The on-line experience is paramount, and hundreds of companies in this space are experimenting with direct-to-consumer revenue models, incorporating premium downloadable content, sponsored downloads, micro-transactions, subscriptions and massive tournament play.This - of course - got a few responses. Rock, Paper, Shotgun comments in Peter Moore hates your PC, essentially pointing out that EA Sport's PC ports have been of steadily lesser quality than the console versions.
- Piracy is an issue. Sorry, I know many of you disagree with me on this, but the numbers don't lie. Companies spend millions developing content, and deserve to see a return on investment for their risk. The employees developing the game design, writing code and creating art deserve to get paid for their work. Period.
- Businesses have to make hard trade offs for where to invest for the best return, thus creating capital to make even more games. They have to take expensive risks in our hits and misses industry with new intellectual property to keep the games available to gamers fresh, innovative and pushing the technical boundaries of the hardware platforms. I know this concept touches a nerve with some of you, but our industry is founded on publishers that have driven for financially-successful games and then re-invested the proceeds in development of even more content for gamers to enjoy. It's a simple financial premise, and an obligation for publically-traded companies who answer to their shareholders. We are not making games in garages or bedrooms any more.
RampantCoyote takes another angle.
I mean, yeah. They've got a problem. Diablo III has to compete with Diablo I and II. Starcraft II has to compete with the original. That's an ugly secret of why console development is more lucrative than the PC. It's been noted that, as the console becomes "mature," its sales begin to strongly resemble that of the PC market. A generational change in consoles effectively hits the ol' reset button for game developers, and the first 3 or 4 years make it easy to make money. You don't have to compete with the back-catalog.
And Moore didn't admit to some other facts of game development life. Like the fact that it's something like twice as hard to make a PC game than a console game. And it usually requires about 10x the customer support. On consoles, you don't have to worry about tons of different screen resolutions, hardware compatability, what O.S. version the player is running, what security settings are turned on, what other programs are running in the background, how much adware and other crap is tanking the machine's performance, alt-tabbing to another window, whether or not they've got a mouse-wheel, how much RAM they have, how much VRAM their video card has and whether it was made before 2004, whether they are running on a laptop or desktop, whether they are using a QWERTY keyboard or something else, and so forth, and so on.
And Moore is discussing this subject in the context of pumping out crappy PC ports of their console sports franchises. Now, I'm going to assume that he "gets it." He even talks about "lean forward" versus "lean back" gaming between the platforms. PC gaming is a fundamentally different experience than the consoles, and the PC gamer is in a different audience. This means that you can't just make the PC one of the "platforms" for a game and expect it make buttloads of money. You might do better than break even, but it is not a winning strategy.
