Historically the argument of PCs vs. Consoles as game machines was an
artificial argument. The two appeals to very different demographics. Many
gamers, such as myself, simply were not willing to tolerate playing games on a
television. How can you go from playing at 1024x768 to what amounts to 512x384?
(That's 1/4th the resolution).
But times are changing. More and more people are getting HDTV and many games
are starting to support this. This trend definitely doesn't help the PC game
market grow. And the statistics back that up. But there are still certain kinds
of games that only make sense on the PC. They boil down to games that need a
mouse or a keyboard.
- Real Time Strategy Games
- Turn based Strategy Games
- First Person Shooters
- Massive Multiplayer Games
I'm playing Knights of the Old Republic on the PC right now and it's
painfully obviously that it was designed with a console in mind based on the
annoying controls and inventory system. And the game suffers for it.
The issue isn't whether the PC game market will die. It won't. The issue is
whether PC games will be able to keep up with console games from a production
values point of view. The answer to that is sadly...no with a few exceptions. So
let me illustrate this with a report from the year 2007.
By 2007 the only PC-only big budget games will be massively multiplayer
games, which will be well on their way to becoming cross platform to consoles.
First person shooters (Duke Nukem Forever won't be out yet though) and the
occasional RTS. And RTS, btw, won't be considered "big budget" anymore either by
that point. With DirectX 9 or later, you can actually create your own pretty
decent 3D engine. Give me a team of 10 people (5 programmers, 5 artists)
and I'll give you a Warcraft III clone in 18 months that has better graphics.
Warcraft III, of course, didn't have all the advantages that came into being
with the more recent DirectX's so it's not that we're smarter, it's that it's
gotten easier.
What this means though, from a retail point of view, is that when you go into
the store to buy a game, it will be totally dominated by console games with a
tiny area for PC games that will have (Wait for it) some sort of RTS, the first
person shooter, the MMORPG, and a few other popular PC games that are either
cross platform or fall into some unique category.
This, of course, is what PC advocates fear. But I'm afraid it's inevitable.
It's not that the PC market is dying. It's not and it's annoying when people try
to argue that. The problem is that retailers can make more money on console
games than PC games because console games have been growing in sales much faster
than PC games have.
Why Console Games are taking over retail
When I was a kid, my game machine was a Commodore 64. After the Atari 5200
and Colecovision's of the world died off, the console market was gone.
Then one day Nintendo introduced the NES but it didn't really matter because
they couldn't remotely compete with computers yet in any important category.
Gamers were willing to put up with the pain of freeing up more of that last 384K
of "Upper memory" to get Wing Commander to work. They were willing to tolerate
Ultima VI's annoying proprietary pseudo-OS. They were willing to put up
looking through the user manual of Power Monger to look up the copy protection
key every freaking time they wanted to play. There wasn't really an alternative.
Eventually Windows and CD-ROMs made life on the PC easier. And it was good.
For awhile. When the Playstation was released consoles started to get more
competitive. But they still couldn't hold a candle to the PC in many areas.
Outside crummy arcadey games, now in quasi-3D, the consoles were still not very
appealing.
But now, even I have a console. Sure, Nintendo gave me one for free for
helping them create a
Nintendo
Desktop (our non-game side of the business) but I do play it now. I've
bought games for it. The latest generation of consoles have graphics that are
"good enough". And with HDTV and the next-gen of consoles looming, they are
poised to overtake or at least be equal to the latest/greatest PC games in
visual quality.
And they already outsell most PC games. So what are the reasons for
this? Why not just keep using a PC for games? Why are developers moving to
consoles?
- PCs are still relatively painful to use. The typical Windows
user's computer barely boots. Come on, you know what I'm talking about. Many
of you reading this are someone's "computer bitch" who goes over to their
friends and neighbors houses to "fix" their computers. You get over there
and find that 50+ spyware, DDOS clients, and other crap are being loaded on
start-up. That Internet Explorer is so full of spam toolbars that you can
barely see the page and the desktop is covered with icons. And then
you get the game and have to install it. My Knights of the Old
Republic took 30 minutes to install on my brand new Dell 2.8 GHz machine.
Compare that with just putting in a CD and having it work.
- Copy Protection. Someone on Quarter To Three actually had a good
solution to this. But it's not generally utilized. Forcing people to
have the CD in the drive negates the one major advantage PC games have -
that you install them on the hard drive. If I'm on-line, I shouldn't
have to have the CD in the drive. Just have it contact some master server to
"activate" it automatically. If they aren't on the net then sure, have the
CD be in the drive. But this way at least those in the majority would never
have to mess with copy protection in any real way. I wouldn't mind
having to have the CD in the drive if I wasn't forced to install some 1 gig
game to my hard disk before playing it.
- PERSONAL computers vs. PUBLIC televisions. My Game Cube can be
played by my 3 year old son without any intervention from me. My 6 year old
regularly plays Zelda on his own. But do I want these guys on my computer
with their sticky hands? No way. And most people can't afford to have a
"kid's computer" nor would they understand the logic of having one.
- Cost. The Game Cube is $99. A decent gaming rig is going to set
you back $1000. Sure, you can do more with the computer but so what? If
you're not doing games, a 5 year old PC will do most of the work that normal
people do with a computer. This is almost certainly the biggest reason why
consoles have gotten such huge numbers. How can you argue against $99 for a
console that comes with games on it?
So then why are developers moving to writing for consoles?
- Numbers. That's pretty obvious. As the number of users on
consoles grows, the demand grows and so go the developers.
- The rise of cross platform libraries like Renderware. Now it's
much easier to write once and with some minor tweaks have your game on all 3
major game platforms.
- Life for the developer can be easier. If you're a game developer
on the PC, you're in a tough land. Our company has a hit game, Galactic
Civilizations. If you knew how little we make per unit sold at retail you'd
cry. I know I am. Makes me want to just give it up and move to consoles
myself. It is becoming incredibly difficult, nearly impossible, to make a
retail-level PC-only game that isn't one of the huge genres (RTS, MMORPG,
FPS) and not go broke. And even then, only the successful ones make any
money. Let me be plain: If it were not for the fine print in our contract
that allows us to sell Galactic Civilizations directly, not only would we
not consider a sequel, we would have had to lay off our entire gaming side
immediately. That's just how screwed up the system is for PC game developers
right now. Let me put it this way: 100,000 units are expected to sell at
retail world wide, total revenue from those retail sales is expected to be
LESS than $400,000. That is less than the revenue we received from direct
sales which sold less than 10% as many units. That's not a viable business
model.
- Support. Tech support on a PC game is significantly higher than
on a console where the games "just work".
- Piracy. It's not a huge deal on the PC but it is higher than it
is on the console. My neighbor has a Game Cube. You think she's going to go
onto some site and try to figure out how to pirate Game Cube games? She
won't bother with PC games because of the previously mentioned "hassles".
- Difficulty in getting published. The "big" publishers are
increasingly preferring to move to the model of only releasing a handful of
huge titles per year rather than many smaller ones. There is a certain logic
in that. Today, most expenses come from marketing, not development. If those
marketing dollars can be focused on fewer games they can end up with bigger
bang for the buck, in theory anyway. As much as we'd love to have a
mega publisher pick up a Galactic Civilizations II (assuming we could work
something out where 100,000 units in sales translates into real revenue for
us) we're not going to count on it. We'll either have to look at doing
it ourselves (the whole thing) or work something out with a smaller
publisher where retail sales work out better for us.
- Support from the console maker. No one really cares if you make a
PC game. But Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony care a lot if you make a cool
game for their platform. Matching funds and other help are available to
developers. There's nothing like that on the PC except in the increasingly
rare cases where the publisher provides advances on royalties.
PC Games in twilight? No.
Does this mean that PC gaming is doomed though? Not at all. But if PC gamers
and developers want to continue buying and making PC games, some recognition of
the changing reality is in order.
Electronic Purchasing. Yes. Sorry but PC gamers are going to have to stop
bitching about the lack of diversity in games available at the local store. It
ain't changing. There are lots of PC games in development and released each year
that no one ever hears about because they are sold electronically. This is
something we're trying to do with Drengin.net.
The goal is to allow people to buy all the games or cherry pick the ones they
want off of it. Think of it as iTunes for games except you have an option to
also pay to access everything that's on there at 18 month increments. Over the
next year, we hope to add a lot more games to the library but we've run into
snags there which I'll bring up next.
Developers need realistic expectations. We thought it would be easy. We would
talk to game developers whose games were already available on-line but had only
sold a few copies. The 2002 winner of the Indie Games Festival sold <100 units
of their game for instance. So we would go out and try to bring games onto
Drengin.net. Suddenly though they wanted huge bucks for their game.
Our standard deal was:
1) Non-exclusivity - you can sell it still on your own.
2) We'd give you a couple thousand dollars advance on royalties --
often more than the game had made total so far (I know that's hard to
believe but it's true, most of these cool little games out there have
sold only tiny numbers of units).
3) We would give you a royalty off of the total sales of Drengin.net
for a set time period.
Number of third party games on Drengin.net so far: 0. Stardock's had to
create all of the content so far which won't be sustainable long term. There'd
be other snags. We'd get games that were basically early betas. The games we'd
want to put on there have to be complete. They don't have to be huge or anything
just complete. Those with complete games would actually ask for hundreds
of thousands of dollars in advance. It was unbelievable. If something like
this is going to succeed, some long term thinking is needed -- PC games need an
iTunes for Gaming type mechanism where consumers can go and buy this stuff and
get it right there and then and be able to access it from a central repository.
By the end of this year, Drengin.net will have 4 pretty strong titles on it but
realistically we need more than 20 for it to start getting to critical mass.
(btw, if you're a developer with a good complete game, even if it's relatively
small but still fairly original you can contact me at
bwardell@stardock.com ).
But more important than that, gamers will have to get over their fixation of
buying boxed copies. If you are willing to only purchase PC games at the store,
your options will be steadily decreasing. In the long term, electronic sales are
the way to go. We sell millions of dollars of software electronically each
year -- Object Desktop and its
components (the non-game version of Drengin.net -- even uses the same program
manager Stardock Central). So we know it's doable. But if PC gamers can't
make that transition, the increasingly the only retail games they'll be able to
purchase will be in those genres that the PC specializes in (RTS, FPS, MMORPG).
As a PC game developer, we're rapidly reaching a fork in the road. If we can
make more selling 10,000 units direct where we don't have to make boxes, don't
have to deal with nearly the tech support hassles, have less piracy issues, than
selling 100,000 units at retail, then it doesn't take long to realize that maybe
if we were on-line only we might "only" sell 20,000 copies instead of the
110,000 total but we'd make more than twice as much as we did the other way. The
problem would be that it would be one less PC game on store shelves thus making
console games appear even more successful. But I don't see many alternatives.
Of course, none of this is going to happen this year or next year. I'm
speaking of the long run here. But console games clearly have a positive
feedback cycle going. One that I see only accelerating.