Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing quite a few themes that have been making their way through the industry.
Throughout last week at GDC, many of these took center stage in a variety of forms. Today, we examine the state of PC Gaming. Every year a multitude of publications come out proclaiming “PC gaming is dead! All units bail out!?It’s all getting to be a little ridiculous.
Now, let’s not be naive. PC gaming as we know it is in hot water and is very analogous to an arms race. Who’s going to be the first with a water-cooled, overclocked,dual-quad-SLi rig that can run Crysis at an insane resolution with every setting jacked to the point of no return? This is the disarray that Cliff Blizenski was speaking of when talking to Stephen Totilo of the MTV Multiplayer blog.
Arguably the biggest factor of the “disarray?that the PC is facing is piracy, which inadvertently causes more and more former big-time PC exclusive titles to make their way to consoles.
Go back two years, and I ‘m fairly certain that you’d be hard-pressed to find a hardcore PC gamer that wouldn’t scoff at the mere idea of Unreal Tournament or Command & Conquer making their way to a console.
This is the very reason that World of Warcraft and every Sims 2 expansion on the face of this earth has managed to stay at the top of the charts. Those are the games that are scaled back to the point that they will run on any computer released within the past 6 years, give or take a few.
The recent release of SteamWorks further solidifies Valve’s dedication to the PC as a viable platform and marks a milestone in PC gaming. SteamWorks consists of a wide variety of development tools that may be useful to developers of all sizes.
Fast-forward a few weeks and we’ll see Microsoft and Havok following suit. Microsoft unvieled the DreamSpark intiative, which makes a suite of Microsoft tools available for students. Not long after, Havok announced that they will be releasing Havok Complete, their solution to physics and animation in May 2008.
The big bullet point is that all of these companies have (or are in the process of) releasing these tools for free, effectively making it available and possible for anyone and everyone to make a game should they have the patience, drive, and dedication.
Through 2008, we may see PC gaming evolve into something we don’t recognize - and some of us may not like it.
For example, take Battlefield: Heroes. Although it’s very much an off-shoot of the Battlefield series as we know it, it makes a statement about the position that the PC market is in right now. For those that may not know, Battlefield: Heroes is a free-to-play online multiplayer FPS that will launch this summer.
The free-to-play model will work on two fronts, with advertising that EA is claiming wil be non-intrusive, along with content that may be paid for (nature of said content has yet to be revealed) that won’t severely cripple gamers that are playing for free.
The outcome of this ‘experiment?may be indicative of the way that the PC gaming market will go in the forseeable future.
Throughout last week at GDC, many of these took center stage in a variety of forms. Today, we examine the state of PC Gaming. Every year a multitude of publications come out proclaiming “PC gaming is dead! All units bail out!?It’s all getting to be a little ridiculous.
Now, let’s not be naive. PC gaming as we know it is in hot water and is very analogous to an arms race. Who’s going to be the first with a water-cooled, overclocked,dual-quad-SLi rig that can run Crysis at an insane resolution with every setting jacked to the point of no return? This is the disarray that Cliff Blizenski was speaking of when talking to Stephen Totilo of the MTV Multiplayer blog.
Arguably the biggest factor of the “disarray?that the PC is facing is piracy, which inadvertently causes more and more former big-time PC exclusive titles to make their way to consoles.
Go back two years, and I ‘m fairly certain that you’d be hard-pressed to find a hardcore PC gamer that wouldn’t scoff at the mere idea of Unreal Tournament or Command & Conquer making their way to a console.
This is the very reason that World of Warcraft and every Sims 2 expansion on the face of this earth has managed to stay at the top of the charts. Those are the games that are scaled back to the point that they will run on any computer released within the past 6 years, give or take a few.
The recent release of SteamWorks further solidifies Valve’s dedication to the PC as a viable platform and marks a milestone in PC gaming. SteamWorks consists of a wide variety of development tools that may be useful to developers of all sizes.
Fast-forward a few weeks and we’ll see Microsoft and Havok following suit. Microsoft unvieled the DreamSpark intiative, which makes a suite of Microsoft tools available for students. Not long after, Havok announced that they will be releasing Havok Complete, their solution to physics and animation in May 2008.
The big bullet point is that all of these companies have (or are in the process of) releasing these tools for free, effectively making it available and possible for anyone and everyone to make a game should they have the patience, drive, and dedication.
Through 2008, we may see PC gaming evolve into something we don’t recognize - and some of us may not like it.
For example, take Battlefield: Heroes. Although it’s very much an off-shoot of the Battlefield series as we know it, it makes a statement about the position that the PC market is in right now. For those that may not know, Battlefield: Heroes is a free-to-play online multiplayer FPS that will launch this summer.
The free-to-play model will work on two fronts, with advertising that EA is claiming wil be non-intrusive, along with content that may be paid for (nature of said content has yet to be revealed) that won’t severely cripple gamers that are playing for free.
The outcome of this ‘experiment?may be indicative of the way that the PC gaming market will go in the forseeable future.