Rumors of PC gaming’s death exaggerated?
Edge magazine has a fascinating piece this month about the state of the PC games industry. To the casual observer, the market would appear to be in crisis - experiencing a decline in retail sales of approximately 10% per year for the past five years. To draw this conclusion is to miss a bigger picture.
Valve’s Steam service is successfully distributing a wide variety of games and their experiment with episodic gaming in the Half Life 2 expansions. The new Sam and Max mini-games are doing well, even if the buzz says they’re not yet as amusing as the original games.
World of Warcraft isn’t the first to show that subscription models and expansions can infinitely extend the boxed game, and Second Life is proving eerily compelling for many. Meanwhile so-called “casual” games like Popcap’s puzzler Bejeweled sell five million copies.
All of this doesn’t even take into account the markets that many of us are oblivious to. Across Asia millions of consumers have access to internet connections that make ours look pitifully slow. China has over 200,000 internet cafes, 80,000 of which own 200 PCs or more and many gamers cite “socialising” as a main motivation for playing. This is a world apart from the ownership model and gaming culture of the West. They are also way ahead of us in terms of in-game advertising and micropayment mechanisms, which continue to meet resistance in Europe and America.
Asian and Latin American games like Audition, Freestyle, Kart Rider and Sudden Attack draw huge communities, but fly completely under the radar of our mainstream press.
Maybe the days of boxed retail software are numbered, but the diversity of PCs and their users means there is no single gaming market. The evidence points to an industry that’s undergoing an evolution to new audiences and distribution channels.
Maybe I should make a game 
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February 7th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Meanwhile so-called “casual
February 7th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
From what I’ve seen, Far Cry has spread itself too thin. The Wii version is very poor.
I didn’t find the article tired at all, I thought it was well written and wide ranging. Mostly in the areas you haven’t mentioned like the different cultures and consumption demographics in other countries.
Personally, I don’t care very much about the packaging of my games. If the standard of artwork and extras was comparable to Japan, then I might see it differently.
I would imagine that the boxed package isn’t going to disappear, because it makes a game visible to users who have probably never heard of it and that’s an essential part of a launch. A distressing number of people buy games on the basis of packaging. The ability to extend the original package indefinitely, by either the developers or the user community, is a unique advantage of the PC that consoles will probably never match or they wouldn’t be consoles.