An unsexy suggestion for the PC games industry
With a new generation of consoles out, it’s time for the routine bunch of is the PC doomed? articles…
Of course, the PC isn’t dead - quite the opposite. Games like The Sims and World of Warcraft are enjoying huge sales. It is clear however that there is a general decline in sales. A degree of blame is aimed at the spiralling costs of developing a title, but this isn’t a unique concern to the PC. Some dissatisfaction is also expressed with current integrated graphics and their relatively weak performance compared to more expensive GPUs.
Now, there will always be a need for somebody to be pushing the platform forward and making incredible looking games like Crysis for the hardcore PC gamer. I watch ads for PC World on telly though and see Mr Consumer walking out the door, apparently very pleased with his £400 Compaq notebook.
Mr Consumer will not be playing Crysis, whether he wants to or not.
It does beg the question though “why can’t I have a little fun on my brand new machine that cost me more than an Xbox 360?”
When I started learning multimedia design, one of the first things we were told was “design for the lowest common denominator”. Instead of building games for next year’s hardware, why not build them for what is commonplace now? A small development studio could make use of middleware such as the Quake 3 engine, online distribution and episodic releases to create worthwhile games that would run perfectly well on today’s computers and who knows, perhaps sell a lot of copies?
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December 7th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
A small development studio could make use of middleware such as the Quake 3 engine, online distribution and episodic releases to create worthwhile games that would run perfectly well on today’s computers and who knows, perhaps sell a lot of copies?
You’d think, but Telltale aren’t shifting significant copies, despite having some of Lucasarts best talent on board.
Episodic gaming (to me) is just weak and far too short.
Take a look at the BIG games for the PC, Oblivion, F.E.A.R., Battle-thing 2140-odd, MS Flight Sim x… all use latest gen graphics.
There’s only one in consistently in the top ten of late that doesn’t. World of Warcraft.
The point of why develop games for cutting edge hardware comes down to this…
You spend the next two years writting a game for a modern 1 core PC. Two years down, looks like 4 core will be the norm. So I have a choice, do I buy your crappy looking game or the pretty one?
I’m sure there’s plenty of decent films on VHS that never made the transfer to DVD, but average joe isn’t going to dig through and find them nor do they care to. Same for video games, only die-hard fans who know the games go routing for emulators, the majority audience don’t care (the Snake revival is an exception here).
That’s not to say low-graphics games that get released can’t be successful, one of the most apparent would be Uplink, it is just to say that given comsumers have a choice, they’d rather play nice looking crap games, than great reasonable looking ones.
December 7th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
Perhaps they would, and yet the Wii mini games are outselling Zelda…
I think it also shows a bit of a lack of imagination that game developers aren’t looking at the wider capabilities of the machines. Take the aforementioned Mr Consumer with his £400 notebook. And his wireless broadband, and his bluetooth, hell - even his sat nav.
You could make games playable on setups like that, which are quite unlike anything around at the moment, that you couldn’t do on a console at all.