Is PC Gaming Dying?

Intra-Industry

It’s been interesting to be someone looking at the games industry in the last few years, as there have definitely been some notable changes in how publishers and developers have been forced to operate in the face of rising piracy, rising costs and a recently exposed casual market.

There are a lot of events you can blame, but in some ways the obvious one to choose is Nintendo for the way they came in with the gimmicky Wii and allowed gaming to reach a whole new audience. It’s dangerous to speak in generalisations, but it’s worth it here – broadly speaking gaming used to be something for geeks and kids, but it’s increasingly becoming something for your mother and grandparents too.

In itself, that isn’t a huge problem. More customers, more players; it can only be a good thing. At the same time though, this is all about money – and publishers enlightened to an emerging new market and coping with an existing, pirate-crammed one don’t exactly have a hard choice on their hands.

So, there are a lot of publishers out there who’ve started to refocus themselves on pursuing only the biggest and most profitable markets and a lot of developers who are trying to tap into it too.


Look at BioWare for example – a developer with a strong hardcore PC heritage (as they always declare to PC magazines at every press event), but the last games they’ve put out tell a different tale – Mass Effect: Galaxies on the iPhone and Sonic: The Dark Brotherhood on the DS being the most recent. Mass Effect and Jade Empire came before that and did release on PC, true, but were both Xbox-focused and came on the PC only after a lengthy delay.

Don’t get me wrong, I love BioWare more than almost any other developer there is and I don’t want to single them out when I could equally point to Microsoft and the way it laid off its flight-sim team – but BioWare is an interesting case study. Their next PC exclusive title is, naturally, an MMO – one which could topple WoW, no doubt. They’ll apparently be releasing Mass Effect 2 on PC in-line with the console version, but it’s also been widely speculated that they'll push back the PC version of Dragon Age to meet the console release date and minimise piracy.

“They always say the delays are for adding extra PC content” said one industry-insider we spoke to from a major PC hardware company, “but in reality though the delays are about piracy. Always; piracy.”


It’s been interesting to see how the larger publishers have started re-organising themselves in recent years too, with a growing number of publishers and PR companies no longer even sending out PC review code for their games and only providing Xbox 360 code for journalists. It’s exactly the same game after all, but they’re less likely to face piracy and tech problems with console code. You can play the game just as well on a console, they argue, though from our point of view that’s hardly the point – what’s important here is that the opinion of some publishers is proving infectious throughout the biz.

The problem too is that for many genres you can play them just as well on a console. There are a few exceptions, like RTS games, but there are a number of developers actively working on solving that (with varying levels of success) with new interfaces. If nobody can crack the problem then surely it’s only a matter of time before RTS games begin to be marginalised or Microsoft and Sony bring proper keyboard support to their consoles – especially when they know they could make a killing selling official peripherals - or is that being cynical?

Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the major publishers and developers have been splitting the traditional PC-centric RTS genre into console-suitable RTS/RPG hybrids that focusses more on small squad movements than whole map management. Take Dawn of War 2 for example, which is an especially good example when compared to its predecessor.