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Game Devs On the Future of PC Gaming
Shacknews wraps up a developer panel at PAX East discussing the future of gaming on the PC. They cover topics including DRM, digital download platforms and cloud-based gaming services.
"Joe Kreiner of Terminal Reality: 'If you look at it from a giant publisher perspective, then the numbers on the PC just really don't make financial sense for you to bother with it. But if you start out with the mindset — you know, you're targeting that group, you make a niched product that's going [to] do well, if you look at a lot of the titles on Steam, Torchlight's a really good example — as long as you know that's your audience to begin with, and you make something inside of a budget that you know you're going to be selling those kinds of numbers, you can be very successful. I think it just takes a targeted developer. ... There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"
It looks to only be a problem for highly expensive productions.
Smaller games that start giving benefits after some thousand sales will thrive on a market devoid of big fishes.
Which is fine by me.
John Abercrombie: "I think there's just too many options out there, honestly. Too many options for people to buy. With the consoles, there's just one. You just go to the store and buy the one."
So would that one be PS3, Xbox 360, or Wii? At least PC games are supposed to run on both NVIDIA graphics and ATI graphics.
John Abercrombie: "I think browser-based games are really cool...you don't need a PC, you just have something that has a browser. That way, people who were targeting PC or multiple configurations on PC before can just target a browser."
With or without the DOM event model? With or without SVG? With or without HTML5 Canvas? With or without HTML5 Audio? With or without Flash? With or without Java?
Joe Kreiner: "Most of the innovation right now, console-side, is designed around a living room environment. That's not typically where you have your PC."
So you ignore the entire home theater PC market, which has grown since HDTVs displaced SDTVs in stores.
"Oh if you look at the numbers PC games just aren't worth it for big publishers!"
Really? Then why the fuck do they bother? Since about the beginning of 2010 we've seen the release of:
Dark Void
Mass Effect 2
Startrek Online (only for PC)
STALKER Call of Pripyat (only for PC)
Bioshock 2
Napoleon: Total War (only for PC)
Supreme Commander 2
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Assassin's Creed II
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising (only for PC)
Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight (only for PC)
Metro 2033
Dragon Age Origins: Awakening
Settlers 7: Path to a Kingdom (only for PC/Mac)
Just Cause 2
This is just a list of titles from major publishers, doesn't count any indy games or the like. Now I notice a few things about this list. I notice it is quite a few games, I notice that it includes major titles also on the consoles, and I notice that it has major titles that are PC one. Also some of these titles (like Metro 2033) are enhanced for the PC, meaning you get better graphics or the like on the PC version. That tells me that the PC is NOT a minor platform that "Doesn't make sense" for big publishers. Tells me it is still a big platform.
In fact, as far as I have seen, PC game revenues are still the largest out there. They are bigger than any single console platform. They aren't bigger than all consoles combined, of course, but then you wouldn't expect that. Each console is a separate platform, and the PC is separate. Of those, the PC seems to have the highest revenues.
The fact that big, expensive, games keep coming out for the PC, in particular from studios that also publish console titles (like EA and SEGA) tells you that indeed the PC is very worth it to publish for. If it weren't, they wouldn't.
Remember it is real simple: You take all your costs to make something, all the development, support, staff and so on, call that X. You then take all the money you bring in selling that, call that Y. If Y is bigger than X by a non-trivial amount, say 10% or more, then it is worth doing. You are making a profit, and that's what matters.
These people who think that piracy is "killing" the platform need to tie a can on it. It is clearly not. To me it smacks of the same thing Hollywood loves to do when all movies "lose money" on paper and they cry and whine, yet keep releasing them apace. Tells me that there is no small amount of BS going on.
Agreed. All the major PC games I purchased last year were PC exclusives, with the exception of Dragon Age. (And even there I was rather disappointed with some of the consolized design decisions, though it did do better than most of the other PC ports out there.) Companies like Stardock, Valve, and Blizzard prove that profits can be made in the PC gaming sector. (I don't even like most Blizzard games, but I'm glad they still support PC gamers, so I may consider giving them my money in support.)
Indie games are starting to really come to their own on PC, since it is an unrivaled platform for developing and distributing, especially since the profit margins for selling in the PC marketplace are so much better than something like XBLA. Plus there are tons of free games that are amazing as well. This past year I've spent more money on indie games than on big budget games alone.
I think the main issue for big-name developers is that they force themselves into huge budgets, trying to make games with hyper-realistic graphics, famous voice actors, etc. They just end up being so expensive that the only way to make a good profit on the game is to have big sales, and at the moment, consoles do indeed sell more because they're more accessible on a mass market scale. However, to have big sales, the game not only has to look good, but to appeal to the general gamer population, which means watering it down to be generic enough that a large amount of people will buy it. The result is a bland and uninteresting game with overblown production values.
The perfect example of where PC developers should be going is Sins of a Solar Empire. During development, the budget was limited, resulting in a game with slightly lower production values, but something that still looked fantastic, and as an added plus it ran on a wide variety of machines. Plus the core concepts of the game were still there, and while this focus meant that the game wouldn't appeal to the entire gaming population, it did appeal to a significant group. Add to the mix a lack of DRM, and there you have a game that was a dream for many PC players. The results show in the profit margins, which are higher than many of the large budget games out there. Granted you have beasts like Modern Warfare 2, but how many other big-budget games sell anywhere near as well?
And then there is the lock-in that a gamer experiences with console games. If the company decides to stop supporting the game, you just can't play anymore. (See Halo 1 and 2 on the XBox, and the whole slew of EA titles that lost support.) Meanwhile, I recently reinstalled Descent 2, a 15 year old game, and found a fairly active online community that still plays. (To say nothing of the Quake community.)
In any case, I've always been a PC gamer, have never had a console, and plan on staying that way for a long time to come.
"Every point of that has been true for the last 25 years. It hasn't kept PC game companies like Blizzard or EA from becoming multi-billion dollar ventures which rival the largest console companies"
I'm not sure where you get the impression EA is really a PC game company. I suppose you could say it was, a long time ago, back in the 80s, but it's been as much a console game company for a long long time, think of games like Desert Strike for example from the start of the 90s that was released on the Mega Drive initially, but also platforms like the Amiga, and Atari ST. Looking it up in fact, it was released in '92, the same year as one of the PC's first real successes as a mainstream gaming platform- Wolfenstein. So to suggest EA somehow has it's roots as a PC gaming company when it's been doing games for other platforms just as long, and when through the last 20 years the majority of it's profits have come from consoles (i.e. EA sports titles) is ignorant at best, dishonest at worst.
Blizzard is however a good example of a successful PC gaming company, but it's really just a one off- the majority of it's fortunes have come from WoW and despite numerous attempts, billions of investment, countless major IPs no other PC gaming companies have managed to immitate the success of WoW which begs the question as to whether the PC gaming market only really has room for one multi-million userbase MMO in the first place, and if that's the case, it's not exactly an example of something that can be held up as evidence of a strong market when only one company can truly tie up the vast majority of it like that.
Blizzard doesn't rival the largest console companies, because it's had to merge with what is primarily a console company to stay competitive- Activision. As pointed out above, EA is for the most part a console company and has been for a long long time, so your examples really don't hold up much weight. Even the likes of id Software, one of PC gaming's finest has now been eaten up by a publisher, and this is exactly the problem- even the most succesful PC games companies have been eaten up by larger publishers who have more interest in consoles because that's where the money is, and has been for a long long time. The fact is, even the most succesful PC games developers get eaten up by companies making the majority of their profits from consoles.
If you want a real example of a succesful company that's managed to avoid being eaten up, I'd say Valve is the only real one, but again, Valve's done it by becoming a publisher, and cornering the PC digital distribution channel pretty well, rather than through just developing games.
"Why? PC games interfaces are not dumbed down for a living room interface, and thus can present more of a challenge to either creativity (Sim City, The Sims etc) or tactical/strategic skill (FPS, RTS etc). Mario, Wii Sports or Halo might be fun and can be a challenge for hand/eye, but aren't not exactly intellectually stimulating and engaging in the long term."
This paragraph is just absurd, you do realise games like Sim City had console ports that worked fine right? You do realise contrary to popular belief amongst PC gamers, there is a sizeable amount of RTS games that play just fine, and in fact, because the speed at which you can scroll is capped unlike with a mouse, competitive console RTS gaming is based far more on thinking and tactics than who has their mouse sensitivity the highest and can hit their macro'd hotkeys quickest? Processor speed, mouse sensitivity, macros and so forth are all out the window, it's an even playing field and tactics trump all. Did you really try and make the implication that PC games are somehow generally more intellectually stimulating than console games? I'm guessing you don't really know what console games are out there, because for every genre on the PC, games exist on the consoles too, and about the only genre that doesn't work well right now on consoles are MMOs, simply because typing is still the best way to communicate lots of infor