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Valve Questions Microsoft's PC Gaming Commitment
GamesIndustry.biz is reporting on comments from an interview they conducted with Doug Lombardi, marketing manager at Valve Studios. Lombardi criticized Microsoft's recent commitment to PC gaming in the form of the 'Games for Windows' initiative, which we've previously discussed here on the site. In Lombardi's view, this new push for games on the PC platform is nothing more than an extended advertising scheme to sell the Vista OS. "'Sony and Microsoft both have armies of PR people whose job it is to cram that information down the throats of press and analysts every day ... All those people do is say the PC's dying, the console's winning, and nobody on the PC side is championing that platform. And sales data tracks retail, and there's no doubt about it, PC sales at retail are declining ... World of Warcraft is making a whole lot of money outside of the retail channel, we're making a decent bit of cash off Steam, all the casual guys are not tracked - the PopCap games, Bejewelled, all that stuff doesn't show up.'"
It happens every couple years. The new consoles come out, everyone's hooked onto them and the PC games die down. A year or two down the road PCs come out ahead, or at least on par again. As for the whole "Gaming for Windows" that's obviously just a marketing scheme Microsoft is using in prediction for when PC gaming catches on again.
It is all about the metrics:
.... ...
PC gameing is not dead. Probably more people playing longer and more often than ever before (Warcraft).
Retail Box store sales of PC games is low compared to console sales.
Hours played of PC games: missing is Warcraft, web games,
Sales: missing is Warcraft, online sales
Blizzard gave the box stores a thank you for the Burning Crusade release. It could have totally be done with a download and all those stores would have had nothing (currently you can do a direct online, avoid the store upgrade).
Because PC's can download, even burn DVD's. New PC games can totally avoid the box stores in the future.
If the box stores want to live they must champion the console games.
Valve could make extra cash by championing a download system, if they make it work out for more cash for a game maker than a box store. It could be the end of box stores.
I don't see the huge issue with Steam, and why everyone thinks it's evil and want it to go away. Personally, I love it, especially because other companies are starting to adopt it. I hate having to store CDs, keep them in good condition, and find them every time I want to play or get a crack if I don't care about online play. Steam is a way to centralize the games you own, let you re-download them and even play them on different computers. The only problem I see is that Valve can and has decided what you can and can't play, but that's easily countered by going to the store, buying the game (if it's a Valve title) and registering it through Steam. I bought the Source pack in store and added it to my steam account, and if they ever mess up my account I still have the CD key.
That's a blessing and a curse. Of course it's annoying that it takes forever to patch, but the flip side is that you have a company that supports their single-player game like it's an MMO. You were probably downloading nothing but engine updates. I personally find it great that they continue to support their engine and release new revisions of it, without going the Unreal route, making sub-par games with each new version of their engine just so they'll have an engine to sell. I say this is a blessing from my view as a modification developer, though all a normal gamer will get out of it is most stability and some added features.
I think there's definitely been more troll-rating by some moderators recently for non-trollish comments. Even abuse of "overrated" has become rampant. Personally, I think they should limit mod points to one -1 and 4 positives/neutrals to cut down on it. If there was a nintendo/360/ps3 flamewar here it'd be really bad.
See, this is exactly why I don't like digital distribution. With a physical CD, I know that I can just go grab it and reinstall it 5 years down the road. With Steam (or another service), on the other hand, there's always the various risks that Valve went out of business, or lost my account, or disabled it because it got hacked (this actually happened and I had to email Valve a photo of my original Half-Life 1 CDs to get it reinstated), etc. that only occur because my property is out of my control.
Incidentally, it is because of this that I don't own Half-Life 2 (although I might go buy a physical copy in a store, eventually).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Steam does this right now, so far as I can tell. There's loads of non-Valve games available through Steam these days.