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Thursday, February 14, 2008

PC Gaming In "Disarray"

Via Gaming Today:

I think people would rather make a game that sells 4.5 million copies than a million and “Gears” is at 4.5 million right now on the 360. I think the PC is just in disarray… what’s driving the PC right now is ‘Sims’-type games and ‘WoW‘ and a lot of stuff that’s in a web-based interface. You just click on it and play it. That’s the direction PC is evolving into So for me, the PC is kind of the secondary part of what we’re doing. It’s important for us, but right now making AAA games on consoles is where we’re at.
-- Cliffy B

Does this seem like an odd scenario? That the hardware-addicted PC market is getting so full of casual, simpler, and even web-based gaming that it would drive a major developer like Epic to the shores of ConsoleLand?

I think Microsoft has a lot to answer for here. They've completely botched the Vista launch and mostly just try to blackmail gamers to upgrade as opposed to offering PC owners a similar experience to what they can get, for less money, on the 360. Sure, it's still a win for Microsoft in the end - but they're cannibalizing their base in order to pull it off.

2 comments:

Mark said...

Sadly, but the PC gaming industry seems like such small potatoes compared to the console. According to http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/34271/BioShock-Best-Selling-PC-Game-of-August the biggest PC sales in Aug were for Bioshock at 77,000 copies, yet Madden for the 360/ps2 sold 1.5 *million* that same month.

And then think of the massive problems the PC gamer industry deals with, endless registration problems, endless patches, endless driver issues, Endless OS compatibility issues. Its really no wonder that vendors look more and more to consoles.

its such a shame, I love the PC and the mouse/keyboard control. Trying to do things by arrow keys is so lame by comparison, but for a generation of gamers who grow up using them it feels natural. I know my kids use the PC for surfing the net and watching youtube, and the game consoles for all games. Despite having a hot system, they are not really interested in pc gaming.

Josh said...

If I wasn't interested in writing game mods still, I probably would have replaced my PC with a 360 in lieu of a new vidcard a while ago.

The only thing that keeps me from not regretting that is being able to play 32 player TF2 matches...