You remember that old saying “Follow the money?” whenever you wanted to find the answer to something? It still applies…
For years now PC Gaming has “been dying” and giving way to consoles; the more locked down, publiser/advertiser friendly, vendor lock-in-encouraging devices that have meant to replace the 20 billion PC gamers on the planet.
Yea after year PC Gaming is dying, is dead, died last week or will die in a month… but we keep hearing about it.
Do you want to know if it’s dead or not? Just follow the money.
First we have World of Warcraft, one of the most-played, most successful games on the entire planet… that’s only on the PC. Next we have quite a few of the E3-announced Triple-A titles coming to PC like Fallout 3 from BioWare and lastly is the possible leak that Grand Theft Auto 4 is prepping a demo and subsequent PC-release later this year.
Gaming companies wouldn’t be spending this money on PC development if they weren’t more than recouping those costs to do so; and not just break even, but make a significant amount of money to justify the continued effort. Especially the big-name companies like Activision and BioWare that have been in this PC game for 10+ years and have a hell of a lot of historic data to look at and trends to generate to see how PC sales are trending… if they were trending downwards they would stop investing this money in the PC development side of these expensive titles, but obviously it’s not because they keep releasing.
Lastly you also have Valve, a company that has structured it’s entire existence around the PC Gaming market. It’s true with Orange Box Valve finally took their titles to the consoles, but instead of an act of desperation I think that was an act of supplementation (I just made that word up); they aren’t stupid, the console market is red-hot and having your titles and middleware (Source Engine) on those console is important not only for your future titles and game sales, but also for your milddleware income and license agreements around the Source Engine; you need to prove to potential buyers that your software works on all the consoles and does it well.
You also have Valve creating an entire distribution channel, Steam, around the PC Market as well. Steam effectively being what Playstation Network or Xbox Live is, but to the PC market instead of the console market.
Then you can look at the 3D hardware market, ATI and NVIDIA, while a bit slower this year, are still releasing expensive top-tier 3D cards for the PC game market… again two companies that would have plenty of historical trend sales information to see if they should keep putting R&D time into the PC market or try and redirect a lot of that effort to wards embedded or mobile development instead.
Obviously they are still selling significant amounts of hardware to justify keeping their primary sound of R&D and sales focused on the PC sector.
Between all these data points, the actions of these software and hardware companies speak a lot louder than the rumors or analysts saying that PC game is dead and gone and we should just move on.
Update #1: It now looks like EA is banging around the idea of putting together pre-build “Crysis Certified” PCs for the PC Gaming market to sell along-side the Warhead launch… if this wasn’t a profitable market, there is no way EA would be doing such a rash thing (entire hardware product line to coincide with a single title launch? That’s like Rock Band or Guitar Hero level commitment x 4 or 5).
