Seriously folks, the idea of the PC as a real gaming platform just needs to die. This is a monster that is constantly cannibalizing itself and anyone who dares to try to tame it with their wares. Case in point: a very bitter Michael Fitch speaks on the now defunct Iron Lore Entertainment which has closed their doors after the release of the modestly successful “Titan Quest.” This was said to be due to the fact that they could not secure enough funding for their next project, and the details of how that takes place on the business side is beyond me, but Mr. Fitch felt a need to give us his two cents in a rather pathetic rant bemoaning PC game piracy, and all the stupid reviewers out there. Now I do not advocate piracy, nor do I really think that it is “destroying profits” as most of big business would like us to believe. And I have read a review or two that made me think the person writing may have been mentally challenged. But that is neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned.

As a gamer for over 25 years I have owned and played every platform available. And for many years, during the advent of the 3Dfx card revolution, I spent many hours and many dollars on PC gaming. I learned a lot about how to build my own machine, tweak reg entries, drivers, overclock expensive hardware add ons, and all manner of all the various elements that would determine how well a game would run for you. And while the techie tinkering was fun for a stint, it left me realizing that out of the hours I would spend to play the game, at least a third of that was not spent actually playing the game.

I’ve been around and in the biz long enough to understand that if you go the route of a PC game developer, you have to balance the original desire for your kick ass design versus the number of potential customers and the current level of the majority of hardware in the market. And all the various hardware developers do not make that easy with all the various configurations for video cards. Not to mentions middleware, and direct x and physics additions that continue to enter the market. We may whine about the different hard drive configs for the PS3 and 360, but at the end of the day, the internal configs don’t change. Sure PC games can be bleeding edge, but only a small percentage of market will get that level out of the software, everyone else just gets a crappier version for the same price. Meanwhile all of the console gamers get software that (in most cases) can be optimized for a set of specs that will not change, and can be made to really shine in the hands of truly gifted programmers. Sometimes it’s story over graphics, sometimes in visuals over length of play, but unless it’s just a lazy dev team (looking at you Capcom PS3 team) then they have one less weight on their shoulders. And trust me I know their are still things beyond the dev teams control, like deadlines, profit goals, fiscal markets, lack of funding from publisher, little to know ad time, etc.

With the 3 major console players now providing options for smaller development teams to get their ideas made and delivered their really is no reason to keep wasting time on the PC. Let them keep MMO and Strategy games, let the big boys use it for a testing ground for technology, but don’t bow out and then start laying the blame on everyone else. Don’t blame some reviewer, or your publisher for using crappy DRM on the game. That’s just another area where consoles have an advantage as well. As a realist I simply know for a fact that their will always be some level of pirated software, but if this industry has grown as much as it’s been reported, it obviously has very little impact. If this team was as passionate about gaming as I think they were when they started they’ll regroup, or find work elsewhere, it just makes them look like whiny quitters when they cry foul in an industry that they should already know plenty about. I say they need to regroup, head over to Brian Sullivan’s garage, download the XNA studio or have everyone chip in for a WiiWare dev kit and get back to work. Quit wasting your damn talent and our time pointing fingers. Just don’t be one of those console dev’s that complain about not having a hard drive.