Part of me is loathe to jump on the cacophony of writers proclaiming PC gaming to be dead or dying. After a slew of bad news culminated by the utter disrespect showed by Infinity Ward, I find it hard to play my usual role as devil's advocate and say that they're all wrong.
Today word came that EA axed
1,500 employees, and cancelled over a
dozen projects. Also notable is their decision to buy a mobile/social gaming company, with the suspect intent of producing games for the Facebook/iPhone crowd.
One many remember a year ago, when EA was the "Evil Empire" of the gaming industry, cranking out poor sequels, riding heavily on their series of sports games, in which a developer would upload a spreadsheet of that year's roster, increment the year counter, and sell it for a cool $60.
To their credit, they came around, did some soul searching, and decided that original IP was worthwhile after all. Mirror's Edge was a bit of a disappointment, Brutal Legend and Dragon Age were spot on.
Despite this, the sales haven't been there. Look over to Activision, where it's boisterous CEO proclaims openly about "taking the fun out of making video games" and "exploiting" IP on a yearly or semi-yearly basis. The crowd complains, and yet, their profits grow. What's going on here?
The PC gamer demographic is dying. For years a bit of an exclusive club, many nonetheless attempted to climb the steep costs and technical know-how to play games on what was for a long time, a vastly superior platform. Better multiplayer, vastly better graphics, and a platform open to modification make PC gaming THE platform to beat. While the Nintendo and Playstation were certainly more accessable and sold in greater numbers, the PC market was still too large to ignore.
That is slowly changing. With the current generation of HiDef, internet connected consoles, the PC has lost many (though not all) of the advantages it used to hold. In most categories, the gap has closed to the point that the few advantages held by a computer are made up for in the low costs of a console.
This is not all together bad with the exception of the detriments to console gaming. Consoles are closed platforms, all-up "wooden" boxes where modification is actively discouraged. Worse still, these aspects are not being eliminated, but rather, spread to PCs.
Looking at two major moments of "Nerdrage" in the past year: Activision/Blizzard's decision not to allow for LAN play in Starcraft 2, and Activision/Infinity Ward's decision to do the same for Modern Warfare 2. Both games will eliminate LAN play and dedicated servers in favor of a gaming portal website. Both systems will require players to go through the services provided by these companies in order to play multiplayer.
This is commonly referred to as consumer lock-in, where you can force your product market to using your associated services only, therefore funnelling the added revenue spent on these products to you. I'll leave the legality of such tactics for another discussion, but from a purely business standpoint, the logic is sound.
Let's look at other trends in the game industry, such as paid downloadable content, and the increasing "MMO-ification" of many game titles, and we see a trend. Publishers are looking for ways to make profits of a title persistent across a game's lifespan rather than limited to that rush of sales in the first few weeks. It's hard to see why. Blizzard's MMO World of Warcraft is a veritable money faucet, and publishers have been drunk on the idea of such a steady profit flow for a long time.
It would be enough if the idea was to provide added value over the lifespan of a title, but recall the mention earlier of "lock-in". Why should a company settle with having to compete with free services and content (such as community servers and modders) when you can ensure that the only place to add value to your title is through the publisher?
Consoles offer no expectations towards modification or community run functions, and so this is relativally easy. Whether it's funnelling players to an ad-driven multilayer service, or ensuring only paid DLC is available for a game, publishers can ensure a persistent cash flow.
The PC gaming community is not used to this, and most are antithetical to the idea. But this is where it is going. Modern Warfare 2 will probably be regarded as the first, best example of a limited in functionality, closed system game, a direct "console port", even in spirit. And while some developers may speak defiantly about retaining an open platform, the allure of added profits (often accompanied by the boogyman of "software piracy") will ensure that the PC will get less and less focus as time goes on.
The short end of it is that the console market is much larger and much easier to control than the PC gaming market. Those loud few who criticize and balk at companies like Activision for cranking out unimpressive sequels while limiting consumer choice will have their voices drowned out by millions of tweens all too eager to lay their hands on what should be considered a mediocre title, all too unaware of how good it could really have been.
My faith in the free market still unshaken, I have no good news for this trend. As EA's woes and Activision's success have shown, open PC gaming does not make business sense. I'm glad I at least saw it at it's height.
