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?"

Comments

Newer Games are more hassle then older ones.

[CFBMoo1]

I played Dragon Age and it was a decent game, but after playing the campaign there wasn't much for me. I had no desire to purchase additional content from the on-line store. There was no multi-player like there was in NWN1. Also the toolset I couldn't get working for it unless I did some trickery with my SQL express install from Visual Studio.

Quite frankly I had more fun and incentive to buy NWN1 expansions then I have to buy Dragon Age expansions. The NWN1 expansions added more to the single player and more to the toolset which was way easier too install and use then the DA one. I got way more replay value out of that.

Torchlight gave me some great fun, though the limited number of installs will keep it from sticking around on my computer. I've switched to Vista and had a hard drive failure and had to reinstall the game twice. Now I'm eye'n up a SSD to replace the main one which means a reinstall there too. Same thing with Plants vs. Zombies, great game but the limited install options means it won't stick around on my machine too much longer either if I upgrade hardware any time soon.

I noticed there are a lot more nicer game options in my package manager these days on my Ubuntu machine. That and my older games with the less hassle installers go nicely under Wine.

Re:Piracy

[anarche]

Also HL/HL2 is a terrible example since its one of the longest-lasting FPSs ever seen (referring to CS obviously)...

ahhhh CS:S