I was thinking about this earlier tonight, along with some of Peter Molyneaux's recent comments on the state of PC Gaming which he claims is mostly "World of Warcraft and The Sims".
Well you know what? It's hard to get people to upgrade to play newer games when WoW and The Sims are the top sellers. Hell, Counter-Strike and Starcraft are still dominant games in their genres. Can anyone tell me what the common link is?
All these games can be run on a TOASTER (Sims 2 and WoW requiring a slightly beefier toaster, but a toaster regardless). How about casual games which don't usually require a ton of resources or a 4 hour long tutorial? More toasters!
If they want to get people to invest in PC Gaming, we can't have this crazy BS where I have to go out and shell out for more than a PS3 in order to get by for a couple more years. Console cycles last close to 5 years on average and cost say $300-400. New PC hardware... you're talking $200 for a mid-range card, $100+ for the mobo, $100+ for the processor, $100+ for RAM, and we'll toss in another $100 for Windows. That's easily $600+ and you'll get by for nearly 3 years. So let's see. Consoles cost less and last longer... why do we bother with PC games? I spent $600 dollars 2.5 years ago to upgrade my main PC and I could barely play the BioShock and UT3 demos. This is not satisfactory.
The only way they can bail out PC gaming (assuming it is actually dying and not just caught in some weird cycle as this industry tends to follow... let's see RTS games already had their spot light, FPS games are slowly losing their prime time... hmmmm) is the following, in my opinion:
1) Drop hardware costs. These need to come down to something more manageable for the average user. Silicon is cheap these days, storage is plentiful. If consoles are more attractive because they are cheaper then the PC side needs to come down in price to remain relevant.
2) Leaner OS. MS can start by quit trying to force gamers to upgrade to Vista prematurely by keeping DX10 as the carrot before the proverbial stick. Compared to XP, Vista's minimal requirements are insane. I'm sorry, games take enough resources these days, I don't need the OS sucking up even more of them in the background.
3) Developers need to write scaling code better, and quit targeting high-end performance systems. I find it insane that people were actually excited about Crysis bringing their systems to their knees. This is absurd. If companies want to get more people buying their software they need to focus their attention more on lower end systems. There's no point in making a game and releasing it if no one can play it. Consoles sell because you don't have to worry about system requirements. Stuff just works. If I could wait 4 years between upgrades, that's money I could put towards more games.
4) An optional nice gesture would be less restrictive DRM. Either ditch it entirely or allow the developers to strip it via later patches, something Epic traditionally does and Blizzard has started doing recently.
I think it's a nobel idea to form a committee of sorts to review the state of PC Gaming, but I highly doubt anything is going to come out of this. This is a nice "feel-good" move, but without more companies participating (Epic is the only developer) this seems like nothing more than an expanded version of Microsoft's Games for Windows initiative. Where is EA? Where is Blizzard? Ubisoft?
