The Imagined Future of PC Games

PC Gamer has up a five-part series prognosticating the future of PC gaming. (part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) Graham Smith, Kieron Gillen, and a few other PC games folks make some big-picture predictions about where console gaming's aging sibling is headed. Some of their predictions are fairly safe ("6. The mouse won't die, and graphics cards will get more powerful."), but others may be a bit contentious: "4. Steam and similar services will crush PC piracy. There's been a lot of talk from developers - old rivals id and Epic chief among them - about piracy making it harder for them to justify developing PC-only games. There's so little profit in it, apparently, that the poor fellows are left with no choice but to stray from their beloved home-platform and develop for consoles too. And yet the only games out there with a zero percent piracy ratio are all PC-only: MMOGs. They have a headstart in the anti-piracy crusade: connecting to a central server is an integral part of the game, so verifying that the user's CD key is unique can be done without much fuss. And no one's going to complain that a MMOG requires an internet connection; that's pretty obvious from the concept itself."

Comments

Hmm, a serial and a central server . . .

[Maradine]

And yet the only games out there with a zero percent piracy ratio are all PC-only: MMOGs. They have a headstart in the anti-piracy crusade: connecting to a central server is an integral part of the game, so verifying that the user's CD key is unique can be done without much fuss.

Not all MMO's have been PC-only (and of those, there has been piracy, PSO anyone?). Further, I'd argue that connecting to a central server with a CD key is not proof against piracy. Finally, the primary financial outlay surrounding an MMO is purchased time, not software.

Don't get me wrong, the pressures facing the PC side of the industry are very real. But if we're talking about means-to-profit, piracy is not the main threat that the MMO's face by a long shot. As with many things, the fulcrum is much lower elsewhere . . . account phishing and gold farming are by-and-large the most profitable way to attack the system.

I'm also very curious about the implied assertion that game piracy has been licked in the console world.

M

Re:Hmm, a serial and a central server . . .

[paeanblack]

Further, I'd argue that connecting to a central server with a CD key is not proof against piracy.

It's not about "connecting to a central server" that fights piracy, it's changing the payment scheme to a method that gives both parties an incentive to play fair. I think a pay-to-play scheme will win in the long run on simple economic efficiency.

Option A) Player pays full fare up-front for a bug-ridden game and assumes developer will release patches in the future.
Option B) Player pirates enhanced version (no DRM) and developer holds their breath awaiting payment for inferior copy.
Option C) Player and developer engage in ongoing tit-for-tat, exchanging partial payments for patches and additional content.

The first two options both have several variants and variables, such as demos, brand reputation, extra box goodies, lawsuits, delayed purchases, etc., but all of those will either increase cost-of-entry or decrease market efficiency. In both of the first two cases, one party must pay extra to counterbalance the incentive for the other party to shirk, a perverse incentive inherent in the payment schemes.

With option C, the player provides a constant revenue stream for as long as they are interested in the game. The developer uses that revenue to maintain player interest as long as it is profitable. This has occurred historically with expansion packs to games, but it was not until widespread broadband availability that the system was sufficiently fluid to handle small incremental tits-and-tats with efficiency. XBox Live has really pushed forward in this direction with their point system.

The only thing special about MMORPGs and low piracy is that they fall more naturally into Option C, where there is less economic incentive for piracy.

The Difference is...

[Shadow Wrought]

If you're playing a MMO than you're wanting to be playing online. Paying for a game that you're playing alone and it still requires a high speed internet connection is just asinine. All they'll do in the long run is push more folks to consoles where they don't have to put up with that.

Piracy Evolves as Anti-Piracy Evolves

[vertigoCiel]

I am reminded of Douglas Adam's Electronic Thumb from HHTTG: half the electrical engineers in the galaxy are working on fresh ways of jamming the signals, and the other half are working on fresh ways to jam the jamming signals. There are ways to get around CD-key authorization besides using someone elses - I believe that people have already found a way to disable the Registration request in the Adobe CS3 beta, by deleting the file that reminds CS3 it still needs a registration number. Piracy is only realy a wide-spread problem after games are succesful enough to be widely pirated - otherwise it's too hard for the average user to find a pirated copy. By this point, the game has made enough revenue to be profitable. It's just the publisher's constant desire for insane profits that forces devs to move to consoles.

Re:Piracy Evolves as Anti-Piracy Evolves

[Osty]

Piracy is only realy a wide-spread problem after games are succesful enough to be widely pirated - otherwise it's too hard for the average user to find a pirated copy. By this point, the game has made enough revenue to be profitable.

Unless you're id, Epic, or other big-name developers and publishers, in which case your reputation in the market is enough for people to pirate your game on day one (or day zero, even), robbing you of that profitable "build-up to success".

IMHO, the solution is not to keep fighting fire with fire. Instead, it's to get into a different game. MMOs are one example. Another example would be similar to what Stardock does. When you buy Galactic Civilizations 2, there is no DRM at all. Instead, you get a serial number that entitles you to game updates. This wouldn't work at all for a typical EA game ("punt it out the door and start working on next year's version"), but it works great for smaller developers with a loyal fanbase. The game of GalCiv2 as it stands today is quite a bit different from how it shipped about a year ago, but if you pirate the game you would not have access to any of those game updates. Also, I'm not talking about intentionally leaving in bugs or any of that crap. You ship as good of a game as you can, and then you support it through its lifetime with feature enhancements (GalCiv2 AI or ship builder enhancements, for example).

We don't need servers, we need napkins

[WillAffleckUW]

Not all MMO's have been PC-only

Exactly. WoW is PC and Mac. Spore will run on Wii, DS, and PC - altho it's a bit of a Massively Multi-Instance Multi-Player Online-Library Game.

Steam-Like Services *WILL* Save PC Gaming

[p0tat03]

I used to be a huge critic of Steam and its related services, but I've warmed up to the idea over time.

As a softdev (and a small-time indie game dev) I have a hard time justifying piracy, and since I've made the moral choice to buy the software I use, it's hit my pocketbooks pretty hard, but it's a decision I am glad to live with. Most of my colleagues are not so conscious, I'm afraid, and most would buy a PC game if it's CD-key locked and the game was all about multiplayer (CS, BF2, etc), but almost none would ever buy a singleplayer game.

In other words, the concept that developers should just intrinsically *trust* the gamer to be moral and buy the game is hogwash. There may be a number of gamers like myself who strive to pirate as little as possible (if at all), but the majority of the world isn't so dev-friendly. I welcome (legal and reasonable) ways to protect developer content.

Additionally, I'm also a huge singleplayer gamer. I loved games like Deus Ex, Half-Life, and the new C&C3, which I bought mostly for the campaign mode (and it is excellent, btw). Many developers are eschewing singleplayer games in favour of multiplayer-only games, due to the fact that the multiplayer-ness easily lends itself to better piracy protection. This leaves gamers like me out in the cold. It is also why I believe, despite the evils of the technology, we must live with it if we are to see more singleplayer content being developed in this world.

Just my 2c.

Re:Steam-Like Services *WILL* Save PC Gaming

[yoyhed]

I tend to think comments about Steam's "poor execution" reek of 2004, when it actually did suck and was in beta. I just started Steam, and it took all of 5 seconds, and now it's sitting in my tray using 3MB of RAM and 0% CPU.

All you have to do is click the arrow on the upper-right to make it use the "old" interface, which is what I prefer anyway. Then set your Favorite Window to Games in Settings. Voila, every time you start Steam, it'll only go to the old-style games window, which is fast, and as you can see above, not resource intensive.

I will admit every once in a great while it'll do an automatic update or something, which does use CPU. But I wouldn't call it a resource hog, unless you're still on a Pentium II with 256MB of RAM. I'm running an Athlon 64 4000+, which nowadays is in the $90 range on Newegg.

My prediction: Enviroment

[EnsilZah]

One thing they didn't mention and i think is going to be important is more malleable environments.
I think this trend was mostly started by HL2's Gravgun, and we're going to see some significant advances in physics and materials in the next few years.
The two best examples i can think of right now are the upcoming Crysis and Star Wars: Force Unleashed.
Sure, attempts like Red Faction didn't do very well, but i think it's time.

Re:M$ Games for windows forceing you to pay for mo

[PIPBoy3000]

Not only bad, it may not be smart. Counterstrike was a fan-created mod which revolutionized the industry. Neverwinter Nights was great because so many people made modules for it. I think we'll see developers looking for ways to leverage user-created content. YouTube wouldn't be worth billions if no one uploaded anything to it.

They said WHAT!?

[Aladrin]

Did they really say that DRM will save gaming on the PC? Are they insane?

Let's be honest, here. Steam is simply DRM with some sugar stuffed around it to make people like it. And it's even broken, already. I've seen quite a few steam-rips out there.

How in the world will an already-failed DRM save PC Gaming?

No, instead, good GAMES are needed to save PC Gaming. Assuming it needs saving at all. Maybe the reason that gaming has been steadily moving back to consoles is because it works better there. The controls and basic interface are familiar, there's no worries about your particular brand of hardware working with the game, the DRM doesn't often bite you, etc. With the exception of a few games that really do play better with mouse and keyboard, consoles have PCs beat. And they are cheaper. Even if you buy them all.

A couple years ago, I'd have laughed in your face if you said I'd prefer console gaming now. But with power of the XBox 360 (and PS3, theoretically... wish they'd go ahead and make a good game for it) and the innovative interface of the Wii, I rarely game on the PC now. Enough so that I am back using Kubuntu as my main OS because I rarely feel the need to be in Windows.

More to it than DRM

[SanityInAnarchy]

Being able to impulse-buy a game and have it playable either in a few minutes or in a day or so is a huge deal. Also isn't bad getting periodic updates (HDR for Half-Life 2 and CS:S).

As for DRM biting you... I've lost, scratched, and otherwise killed game discs, and on a console, that's it, no more game for you. On Steam, just re-download and reinstall -- or burn a backup DVD, or whatever.

I don't like the DRM either, and I won't make excuses for that -- technologically, it sucks, too, as does anything that requires IE to play a game. But it is actually a good idea, and it works very well.

Piracy, right... more like too many mediocre games

[blahplusplus]

Piracy, right... more like too many games, and too many mediocre games at that. The truth is there is simply way too many games for the market to support @ 50+ dollars a pop, then add in MMO's with their subscriptions and everything else and you have perfect storm. Next many games offer nothing new, why should gamers buy games that are simply upgraded rehashes? Game developers only have themselves to blame in their quest of chasing their expensive technolust tastes. The truth is the game industry is the cause of their lack of profit... let's see where the game industry went wrong...

1) While the game market has expanded, it hasn't expanded to keep up with development costs of high fidelity graphics that the industry is chasing.

2) Game industry did itself in, gamers do not control where money is invested, nor what it produces, gamers do not control any of the financial aspects of where money is spent in development (graphics vs. gameplay).

3) Capitalism and designing a good game do not always mix well, with it rubs up against the economic model of society. The more time you spend working on a game 99% of the time the better it will be, if you're independently wealthy or have connections like certain figures in the game industry you can take your sweet time. But the drive for short-term profit over long-term gains has been an emerging problem in the game industry since the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube.

The whole industry right now is suffering since gameplay is getting stale and more games sell based on graphics then gameplay. I was never sure that the game industries model was very stable in many respects. It's built on the whims of a customer base which is not only difficult to understand but is just too diverse to pigeonhole with terms like "hardcore gamer" vs "casual gamer", next add in the mad rush for profits and you get a glut of mediocre games. I wouldn't be surprised of gaming slows down (Tanks) for a bit in the future but as long as their are fresh bodies without gaming experience (new kids being born) they may just be able to keep getting away with rehash city.

Steam is not DRM

[Enderandrew]

To say that Steam is the future of PC gaming is fairly true. To say that Steam directly equals DRM is not.

DRM is a means to strongly limit your right to use something you purchase, to the point of suggesting that you don't really own it.

Steam will allow you to download your content to multiple computers, and freely play your content.

Most music DRM schemes limit your ability to copy your music, or play it on whatever hardware you choose.

Steam is first and foremost a means of digital distribution to skip the distribution middle-man.

Game development costs have skyrocketed, game developers are working more hours for less money, and yet while our expectations rise, our desire to pay more for games has not risen. Something has to give, and many truly great gaming companies have gone to the wayside.

If digital distribution puts more money into the hands of the developer, keeps overall costs down, allows me to purchase a game without leaving my house, install on multiple PCs without even looking for disks, etc. etc. etc., then it is certainly more of a blessing than a curse.

I'm all for digital distribution.

Is Steam perfect? No. But it was largely the first venture in the market, and it is a step in the right direction.