I read that article yesterday, and it is, of course, completely wrong. He shouldn't have used the present tense, since the past one would have been far more appropriate.
He should also look at a far more worrying aspect of the decline and fall of PC gaming: the lack of genres. I remember that, back in the PSX days, most major console games would get a PC port. Sometimes, these ports were terrible (see FF7; thankfully, its fanbase have turned it into something wonderful), but that wasn't always the case. Nowadays, it's extremely rare to see anything other than FPS/RTS, MMOs and Simx getting released on the PC. It happens (see GTA, and the surprising release of SF4 on PC), but it's rare.
Frankly, this baffles me. There are obvious advantages to playing genres like FPS and RTS on a PC, but I can't for the life of me think why there are advantages to playing Action Adventure, platformers or JRPGs on a console (certainly, there were successful PC games from those first two genres in the days of yore). PCs can do anything that consoles can do, so I should say that the lack of diversity amongst PC games is the greatest casualty in its war with consoles.
The solution to this problem is hard to work out, but it would certainly help if people were to always buy the PC version of a game, provided that the port is adequate, especially when it's not from one of the more common PC genres. I know that I always go with the PC version when I can. In an ideal world, there would be just PC gaming; now that we all have PCs, consoles no longer have a reason to exist, besides lining the pockets of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft and giving thirteen-year-olds with anger management problems something to argue about.
| fps_d0minat0r said: so the bottom line is because console gamers pay for their games, they get more attention than the typical pirates PC. fair enough dont you think? Yes, from the point of the major devs, it's fair enough. They're big companies and doing what big companies do best. Their only aim is to make money, after all. However, it's rather irritating to see people continually reward this behaviour. Companies can only get away with limiting our experience by releasing games only on proprietary platforms that limit modding and encourage exclusives (now, we have to buy two consoles, or three, just to play the games we want), as long as customers make it profitable. Unfortunately, customers are doing just that. It makes your blood boil, doesn't it? People enable behaviour that damages us all. Except the big devs, of course. Note that I say big devs; smaller companies benefit massively from the freedom that PCs allow. Just look at Mincraft. And look at the thriving indie scene in Japan (might wanna get out the box of Kleenex when you play some of those). There's no way that these niche genres could survive on a console. i mean if you ran a game devloping company would you care about a market segment where 1m people will buy your product and enjoy it or a segment where only 100k will and your game will be over-run by hacks/cheats and millions of pirates? It is of course true that piracy is a bigger problem for PC games, but you should ask yourself "why?". Is it because PC gamers are naturally thievish? Or is it because nearly all PC gamers (with the exception of some uber casuals playing social games) know how to pirate for their platform, whereas a smaller proportion of console gamers, on the consoles where piracy is feasible, have such knowledge? Successful piracy doesn't require a high level of tech-savviness, but it does require some. So does PC gaming. Console gaming does not, since all you have to do is connect the wires and put the disk in; it "just werks". Now, before everyone affirms the consequent and starts crying, I'm not saying that all console gamers are too baka to download a torrent that isn't a virus or a Rickroll and burn it onto a disk, but I'm sure that most people who are unable to pirate are the kinds of people who were put off PC gaming because Crysis wouldn't work on their mother's OEM PC with a P4 and integrated graphics. Or on their Mac. i dont understant the logic behind why pc versions should be better when they dont bring in a fraction of money the consoles do. It's the same logic that says that a PS3 game should be better than a DS game, even though the latter might bring in more money. In fact, it's more than that, because the advantages with PCs are not merely based on superior hardware, but also on the relative openness of the platform. |
