Is Accessibility Killing PC Gaming?

What Does This Mean?

Hardcore PC fans may well be bridling with rage right now, adamant that they definitely love games which are deep and complicated, not those which are accessible. RPG fans most likely.

The thing is, decent RPGs are getting fewer and farther between. There weren’t that many last year except Mass Effect and The Witcher, though of these it’s worth noting that The Witcher so bug ridden and unstable that it required a second later release in order to appeal to a large enough market.

Mass Effect meanwhile was still massively accessible, essentially building on the mould set by Knights of The Old Republic, but with a more action-orientated combat system that made it more instantly familiar to run-and-gunners. Even here the trend holds up.

Here though comes the real problem and, I think, the real reason that consoles are becoming more and more popular over PC games and why everyone is saying the end of PC gaming is nigh. It isn’t to do with piracy, the comfort of playing on a larger screen and so on – there are obvious and logical counters to these and they get shouted in the forums often enough.


The real problem for PC gamers is the extra accessibility offered by consoles. It’s just easier to get into most console games. A gamepad is just easier to figure out than a keyboard and you don’t need to worry about rebinding controls – something which will always lead you past the options for tweaking graphics and lead to an endless spiral of bewilderment for many people. While you may consider yourself well educated in the graphical options department, the limit to a lot of people’s knowledge is gamma correction on a TV.

I’m not a big console gamer personally and lawd knows I prefer to game on PC over anything else, but that’s because I grew up with it on the Amiga A500+. I have consoles at home, but I just prefer a PC game because I like having a really engrossing experience I know I don’t have to share with anyone and because I adore smarter or slower games like Fallout or, yes, System Shock 2.

In other words, I’m not up here as a PS3 or Xbox fanboy saying that consoles are better for gaming. I’m a PC gamer through and through, but I can also see that as the market changes I may no longer be part of a majority that prefers the PC platform, especially if you take out the MMORPG market.

Which isn’t to say that PC gaming is dying. This isn’t the one of those ‘OMG! PC IZ DED’ things, because the fact of the matter is that the PC is still a strong platform if only from a multiplatform point of view. Programmers know it and understand it and though piracy is undoubtedly an issue, the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t stop even heavily pirated games from turning a profit.


Publishers are still going to be releasing games on PC because there’s no reason not to and there’s still money to be made there. It’s just that the PC will probably no longer be the lead platform for most, no matter how PC orientated they might seem.

Just look at Fallout 3 for example. Here’s a game with a strong PC history, from a developer which has been predominantly PC focused, making an RPG based on the same technology as Oblivion, which launched on PC. What’s the lead platform for Fallout 3 though? Xbox 360, with a PC port released at the same time. The same has been true for Mass Effect and dozens of others.

Accessibility is changing everything. Game designers want their games to be played by as many people as possible and they want as many of them as they can get to finish the game, if only to set up a sequel.

At the same time PC gamers are constantly getting older and (trust me) having less time to play, so the greater proportion of younger generations that have been conditioned on PS2, Gamecube and Xbox are used to planting themselves in front of the TV and want games they can pick up and understand quickly. Not necessarily casual games as those are on the extreme end of the curve, but games which are perhaps more casual than those before it. Think GRAW on the Xbox 360 compared to the original Rainbow Six on PC – an excellent example of how essentially the same game has become more casual without turning into Frogger.