Here I am…

Posted 3/19/08
Categories: PC Games

I know, I know. You’re all wondering where I’ve been this past week or so. Playing a boat load of games maybe? Reading “How to Blog about games for idiots” perchance? Maybe working on my own design doc for the next great game? No… I had to have a bunch of dental work done. Not very exciting I know. But I did bite the bullet and decided to get a more up to date PC rig.

Now you may have noticed that I seem to down the PC as a real contender in the gaming market, but you should probably understand that I do so only after being an avid PC gamer myself for many years. It’s not as if I’m some sort of console fanboy who has never played on a real PC. S’matter of fact I think I’ve only ever purchased one pre-built desktop personally, and even that received a video card upgrade down the road. And I even built my latest rig from the ground up with the help of my buddy who stays up to date on the hardware side (thanks George). Years ago I worked at a CompUSA and my buddies and I would practically compete for highest 3dMark scores, tweaking bios’, overclocking cpu and gpu speeds, spending way too much on the latest video cards. All so we could get the perfect balance of frame rate and visual effects on Unreal (fill in the blank) or Quake (pick your favorite number).

And graphics aside, the PC was home to some of my favorite RPG stories as well. Planescape Torment is still in my top 5 favorite RPGames list of all time. And who can forget the LucasArts classics? Indy, Tentacle, Grim Fandango! Legends to be sure. But I can also say that all my time with my PC only makes a fraction of the overall time I’ve spent gaming on consoles. Consoles simply have a bigger library. Sure it’s split over different formats, and one might say that the PC is in every household. But with each leap in technology you have to invest so much into a PC that you may as well have bought a new game system. It used to be that the PC was the only realistic way to have multiplayer gaming. But even the Dreamcast proved that you could have decent online gaming in the living room, and since then most people would argue that console gaming has even surpassed PC with services like Xbox Live, and the PS3′s game servers, hell even the Wii is trying to get on par (trying, but not there yet).

Maybe I should rephrase my stance on killing off PC gaming. Instead let me present it this way. Let’s let only the elite continue to make PC games, and let the smaller dev teams get to work on some console stuff. Some companies really have the PC game thing down pat. Blizzard, Valve, and even EA really know how to make a hit in that market. But just take a look at the top 25 games based on sales, notice anything? Now just look at PC game sales, pretty sad when compared to all those console games. There will always be a place for the big boys to make great stuff on the PC, but when smaller devs get tricked into thinking it will be more cost effective, but then lose sales because of poor marketing, or shitty DRM protection, or even just tight deadlines that force them to release buggy software everybody loses. With the advent of all these current gen systems providing entry level dev kits, we should simply cut our losses in the PC gaming world, and let the Big Dogs run in a small pack, content to throw us a Sims expansion or Starcraft sequel every now and then that we can play in between our Little Big Planets, Castle Crashers or Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.