In an interview with IGN, Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games makes it clear that he is not optimistic about the future of the PC as a gaming platform, even for such dyed-in-the-wool PC genres like real time strategy.
It’s just a good business decision to have your game of any kind on a console where you can’t pirate it. When you start to refine the control system and you start to take away the barrier of the control system and you start to make that a non-issue, just like we did with first-person shooters, and it becomes more about the game experience and less about the interface, you start to go to the platform where the economics of where the gaming base is.
He also thinks that the upcoming 360 version of Supreme Commander has cracked the interface barrier that has made so many RTS games unappealing on consoles.
We’ve done tests with Supreme Commander where we took the 360 controller interface and plugged it into the PC and played people with the 360 controller against people with the keyboard and mouse. People did remarkably well, so we don’t think the UI is going to be the gating factor in the future of who comes out on top.
What IGN did not ask, but probably should have, was “What have you done that EA did not do? Because Command and Conquer 3 and Battle for Middle Earth II weren’t exactly great console experiences.”
That piracy has some impact on PC sales is indisputable. The only question is the extent of the cost. I have a hunch that the cost is pretty high, but nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to back that hunch up. Console gaming is successful for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with piracy, from ease of use to better QA limits to hardware consistency. As someone who still games on his PC more than his consoles, it’s still hard to imagine making the shift full time.
I do find it hard to believe that an RTS gamer on a 360 could possibly compete with an experienced PC user because hotkeys, control groups and precision mouse control are a huge advantage. Maybe GPG has solved the puzzle, but I’d love to see how. The 360 controller is not exactly an elegant input device.
Taylor gets it right though when he talks about the design implications for RTS in a declining PC market. Using shooters as an analogy, he states:
You’re not going to be your projections and thinking about your market as your PC. You’re going to be thinking about your market on the console. So you’re going to focus all of your creativity around your control scheme of your console, your audience of your console, the age group that you’re going after on your console and what features they want. You’re going to cater to that audience…It’s going to be market driven.
This is why Ensemble’s Halo Wars is so important. It will be, I think, the first traditional RTS designed specifically with a console in mind.
I think that’s a bunch of hooey.
The reason why PC gaming is what it is right now has a sliver to do with piracy and a lot more to do with AOL users.
“I do find it hard to believe that an RTS gamer on a 360 could possibly compete with an experienced PC user because hotkeys, control groups and precision mouse control are a huge advantage.”
Why does it matter if a 360 RTS gamer couldn’t compete with a PC RTS gamer?
RTS games work far better on PCs because they strictly follow a desktop control paradigm: drag and select units, double clicking, and so forth. The reason they’re easy to play on the PC is that so much of that knowledge is inherent to PC use. These control methodologies aren’t appropriate to interacting with consoles, and most RTS games with a PC-origin end up feeling shoe-horned as a result.
“Why does it matter if a 360 RTS gamer couldn’t compete with a PC RTS gamer?”
I’m not sure it does, but Taylor said it was possible and that the 360 SupCom users did pretty well. And as Microsoft, especially, moves to create linkages between their Windows and 360 versions of the same titles, it grows to be a problem with the RTS if there is a huge disparity in user interfaces. I get the sense that Microsoft wants a unified gaming world for its cross platform titles.
It’s a bit odd to read this, isn’t this coming from the same man who got rid of EA as a publisher for SupCom after the first year or so of development because they wanted it to be a multiplatform RTS right from the start (Ã la BfME II and C&C3)? Times can change apparently although I do think an Xbox360 port of SupCom has always been part of the (backup?) plan (otherwise GPG wouldn’t have used the rather troublesome XACT sound system) and CT has never really objected against console RTS’s before.
As long as developers keep the different versions apart and play to the strengths of each platform there shouldn’t be too many problems and I certainly hope that’s the plan with SupCom 2 as well, otherwise a lot of people will be disappointed. It’s impossible to please a PC RTS aficionado with a slightly altered console RTS scheme or a control scheme/game setup that barely tries to bring anything new to the table because it would be constrained by a gamepad.
Of course, maybe Chris is just exaggerating a bit and saying with purpose what the readers of the Xbox360 IGN section would love to read. Remember that he talked about a bright future for PC (Games for Windows label, DX10, hardware power etc.) before SupCom got out.
Chris Taylor: “Right now it’s up in the air, but right now the PC market is kind of voting with its dollars, if you will. ”
Well, I have been voting with my dollars. Very few games have been made recently that interest me. So Cysis had an innovative suit–did it tell a story worth experiencing?
Add to that the number of people World of Warcraft must be draining out of the market. The XP-Vista divide doesn’t help, with companies unwilling or unable to support the new system.
But probably the worst problem is that companies are using the need to protect their investments in developing games as an excuse to abuse their customers. The best example is Bioshock, that sounds like it might have had an interesting story but did everything short of Kevin Levine himself show up at your house to punch you in the stomach to discourage people from buying it.
So, is piracy really that bad now? Why wasn’t it such a problem a few years ago?
“So, is piracy really that bad now? Why wasn’t it such a problem a few years ago?”
It’s always been an issue, but technology improves. You had cheap CD-ROM burners, bigger and cheaper hard drives, broadband, torrents, etc. It’s never been easier to pirate on a worldwide scale than it is today.
(It’s sad to go to Pirate Bay and see thousands of people are downloading Audiosurf, a $10 game. “If only games were cheaper, we wouldn’t pirate!” Uh huh. $0 is less than $10.)
What exactly did Bioshock do to discourage people from buying it? The whole Windows user fiasco that probably affected about 120 people in the world? I’m inclined to call that a message board fiasco, not a real-world one, though I could be totally wrong.
(I bought it on Steam, which had zero issues.)
Anyway, I think it’s fine to say the games don’t interest you. But when you look at the number of people downloading games from Pirate Bay and its ilk, and you consider the number of websites covering PC games aren’t disappearing or showing huge drops in traffic, it’s obvious a large number of people are still interesting in playing and/or reading about PC games.
There’s just fewer who are willing to pay for them. It seems like an obvious disconnect to me.
“What exactly did Bioshock do to discourage people from buying it? The whole Windows user fiasco that probably affected about 120 people in the world? I’m inclined to call that a message board fiasco, not a real-world one, though I could be totally wrong.
(I bought it on Steam, which had zero issues.)”
I don’t have nearly the industry perspective you can bring to the issue, so I can only base my opinion on what I can see and what I’m willing to allow a company to do with my PC, trouble or no. And I don’t have Steam anyway, so I would have to deal with a license so restrictive that I wouldn’t be sure how long the software would be usable. I still dig out Deus Ex from time to time, now on my third computer and countless installations with it.
I realize that I’m spitting into the wind at this point. Not buying games isn’t going to cause companies to make games I like; they will just move where they see the money currently flowing. And DRM schemes are only going to get worse, not better and probably not any more effective. But after 31 years of electronic gaming, I’ve never been this pessimistic about the direction the entire industry seems to be taking.
By the way, I liked your blog post about Cloverfield.
Yes, piracy is rampant and always has been, but sometimes I think it’s become SOP for a developer to spout off the piracy line when trying to rationalize the continued issues with PC gaming. Like others responding to me the big issue is just that too many games are simply ‘meh’ today. Currently (outside of indie games) the games I’m playing the most are all nearly a decade old.
On the subject of RTS games on consoles one thing I don’t understand is why no one allows keyboard and mouse support. There’s a USB port on back of our 360, yes? Seems like we could do a wireless K+B setup fairly easily.
I know the standard argument: people like consoles so they can play on the couch. But if K+B support is optional then it doesn’t force those people into playing that way. Meanwhile the rest of us could slap the ‘board down on the coffee table, or whatever flat surface…
“Like others responding to me the big issue is just that too many games are simply ‘meh’ today. Currently (outside of indie games) the games I’m playing the most are all nearly a decade old.”
Well, you’ve gotten older, and you’ve changed. Or maybe more accurately, you haven’t changed.
There are as many “meh” games today as there were back in the day, and as many “oh my god” games too. We only remember the good ones in the past and forget all the crap ones.
But people are like this with movies, music… basically, all entertainment. We all want to think it’s a problem on their end, but the reality is that most entertainment is made for the you that was consuming it in high school and college. Because you spent a lot more on it then because you had fewer other distractions (family, work, etc.), and you were way less discriminating.
Microsoft doesn’t allow keyboard/mouse interfaces on the 360 because they were so paranoid about the perception with the original Xbox that it was merely a PC port machine.
Sony allows keyboard/mouse control on the PS3, however. I believe UT3 supports it. But really, it’s hard enough to justify creating and tuning multiple control schemes on a PC, much less for the tiny minority of people who would plug a mouse/kb into a console. (It’d probably end up being fewer than PC owners that have a 360 controller for Windows.)
I agree with you in principal Steve, but disagree in terms of hard facts. I can compare my computer game purchases from last year to five years ago and they have drastically changed. What hasn’t changed is my “game time”, nor my economics, etc. In other words in ’07 I had just as much time to game and as much money to spend on gaming as I did in ’02. What’s changed is that there isn’t as much I want to spend my money on. And believe me, I’ve always been a discriminating gamer (to a point).
Computer games have just been boring the ‘ell out of me lately.
Oops. I thought I closed the tag. Only “want” should be bold.
Warhammer William sez:
“The reason why PC gaming is what it is right now has a sliver to do with piracy and a lot more to do with AOL users.”
Wakka? People are so dumb that they do not know good games? That’s a winning strategy! AOL keyword = FUN!
Scott, you can be totally correct and still not have it be the publishers’ fault – I agree that there are way fewer games I would spend my money on today, and my time and economics did not change between, say, 2005 and now. But if the dependent variable changed, and you control for those two independent variables, you still have two others, which are you and the publishers, and you still don’t know which one is responsible. Maybe both.
When I read something like this:
“You’re not going to be your projections and thinking about your market as your PC. You’re going to be thinking about your market on the console.”
I end up thinking: so what else is new? For how long has the PC been the premier gaming platform? It took the bankruptcy of Commodore for the PC broke the entertainment choke-hold of the Amiga and IMO, it was quickly replaced by consoles for the arcade genres. The difference is that the PC can match the consoles for graphics; and controllers today are not the problem they were 5-6 years ago. Compared to the Amiga->PC ports, the ports nowadays are brilliant.
As long as cross-platform development continues, I really don’t see the problem. So interfaces will be made simpler to support consoles. Great, IMO. Who knows – maybe games development will become more about improving gameplay and the interface, rather than trying to exploit the latest and greatest GPU all the time (as it seems to be on the PC).
Piracy and all, you still have to reckon that PC’s have the largest platform footprint in the world. As long as there is a market, there will be people making games for that market. It will also still remain the platform of choice for many types of games (including, without a doubt, 95% of the games I bother playing, but then I’m strange).
There may also be the factor of eSports. For some games, of course, consoles are great – but for others – RTS, FPS – will professional gamers really voluntarily move off the PC to platforms with worse control? I doubt it.
So, there will be less AAA+ million $$ titles that target the PC as their primary platform. Seriously … so what?
Bu then again – I’m probably just strange.
I never said anything about a strategy. I don’t have one and if someone does I’d love to see it.
I do think piracy is a sliver of the “problem” though. No doubt it’s there, always has been there, and always will be there but is it the #1 reason why PC gaming has declined? I have no data at all to back it up, but I don’t think so.
I will say this — websites like Blue’s News which used to be considered THE source for daily game news now has a fraction of the readership it used to have, and it’s basically a PC news site. Traffic for that site has dropped off a cliff. It has fewer readers now than it had in 2001. Why did people leave?
This “war” between consoles and PC, I think, died the minute the Xbox showed people how easy it was to play console games online. That was always the answer from PC gamers back in the day. It was the wrong answer, but it was the one we always heard. Online play. Online play is what kept the PC above systems like the PS2. Well, not anymore.
The masses don’t even consider the PC as a real option. I do have some small data to back this up. I play basketball in rec leagues three nights a week (hear me out I’m going somewhere with this) and I’ve been playing there for about four years. In that time the topic of jobs has come up and by now most people know what I do.
When they first hear that I “play games” for a living discussion begins in earnest, but when I bust their bubble and tell them that I primarily play PC games the discussion ends almost immediately. I might as well say that I play Bridge at the Elk Lodge on Friday nights. It’s completely foreign to them and they cannot imagine playing Call of Duty 4 on the PC over the 360. The topic can be brought up if we start talking sports games because PC sports gaming really *is* dead and I have no option but to play on the console.
I don’t have an answer. I don’t think it’s really even possible to get those people to consider a PC game that isn‘t Minesweeper. Or WoW. The PC is behind the 8-ball from pirates, marketing, system requirements, hardware, and developer support.
All that said, I still had a lot of fun on the PC in ’07. Even if most of the games were console scraps. And Bruce — I always have Warhammer Online to look forward to, right? Ohh and Dawn of War Soulstorm …AND Blood Bowl! I’m good for another year!
Yeah, I’m going to have to disagree about gaming being boring these days. We are living in the golden age of gaming, imo. Last year alone we had some stellar titles released (ME, Oblivion, CoD4, Team Fortress 2, SC + expansion, The Witcher, etc), many of witch I’m still playing.
Now to be fair the point above, half of those I mentioned were either released on both the computer and console, or were console exclusive. And I don’t care. Games are games are games, if they are fun the platform doesn’t matter.
That’s why I think the original point of Troy’s article is really the point here…what has SC console done for the control scheme that EA didn’t with it’s recent RTSes on the console? Did they fix something we aren’t aware of? Did they fix the problem of managing armies/economy/etc in an RTS on a console? If they didn’t do that, then this is just more of the same.
That aside, this is absolutely what GPG needs to be doing though. Whether SC is console happy or not, they need to be looking at the console because that’s where the market is. The PC Gaming market is is slowly withering and the console market is huge and growing. As a game developer, you’d be silly to not at least try to make your games console friendly.
In today’s Games for Windows podcast, Taylor underlines the zoom out as the major innovation for the 360. He says that though it was designed with the PC in mind, it turns out to be a perfect alternative to the panning that governs most RTS interface.
He also alludes to a bunch of selection options, but not a lot of clarity on how they work with the controller.
From a development standpoint, I think the main appeal of consoles is that they represent standardized development platforms. The piracy thing is just a bonus (because it discourages casual piracy–the hardcore pirates don’t care).
I don’t know if the developers necessarily make more money though, due to extra console publishing fees. Then again, consumers are now used to paying the markup. Just look at any new multi-platform release; the DS version is $30, the PC version is $50, the Xbox 360 version is $60, and the PS3 version is $70.
As for RTS games specifically, the interface really is a big problem. I mean, it’s bad enough with a mouse and keyboard, and traditional console controller is much more limiting. I suppose games could be designed to accomodate the controller, but I’m not sure I like the idea of hardware limitations interfering with the creative process. This is why PC gamers complain about “consolization” and crappy ports in the first place.
From a marketplace perspective, you can’t ignore the console market. Then again, developers seem strangely intent on ignoring the PC market, despite the success of popular PC titles like World of Warcraft and The Sims.
“Yeah, I’m going to have to disagree about gaming being boring these days. We are living in the golden age of gaming, imo. Last year alone we had some stellar titles released (ME, Oblivion, CoD4, Team Fortress 2, SC + expansion, The Witcher, etc), many of witch I’m still playing.”
I didn’t say the games were boring; I said they didn’t interest me.
Mass Effect: EA title, so it includes SecuRom 7
The Witcher: I was interested for a while, but I didn’t get a chance to look into it before I got tired of hearing about its mature themes and morally ambiguous world as if those make it a good game all on their own.
Oblivion: currently playing with the level banding removed.
The rest are genres I generally don’t enjoy.
But I think a big part of the reason may lie in what Troy quotes from Taylor near the end:
“You’re going to be thinking about your market on the console. So you’re going to focus all of your creativity around your control scheme of your console, your audience of your console, the age group that you’re going after on your console and what features they want. You’re going to cater to that audience…It’s going to be market driven.”
The economics are now, for whatever reason, such that I am part of a market that more developers are beginning to consider secondary at best.
“he says that though it was designed with the PC in mind, it turns out to be a perfect alternative to the panning that governs most RTS interface.”
While I should probably, uh, actually play SC on the 360, I’ve seen it in action and yeah, it’s much better than scrolling around a map with an analogue stick.
The big problem with an RTS—and a lot of games, for that matter—is that the stick is a terrible cursor. And it isn’t very good for scrolling a map quickly. So the ability to zoom way out, move the cursor a tiny bit, and zoom way in, saves some time and annoyance in a console RTS… because you do that a lot.
I do think consoles bring one positive thing to PC development, a focus on simplifying controls, which isn’t “dumbing down,” as you often increase the complexity of interaction.
On the PC, it’s easy to say, “Add another key” instead of figuring out more elegant solutions. It’s the difference between something like The Sims and its context-sensitive menus for manipulating objects and a game that would give the player a separate command for each possible action, with most of them being invalid for that specific object.
Assassin’s Creed is a good example of this too, as you automatically do a lot of things depending on your place in the world relative to whatever you’re running into/attacking/etc. It also shows the hazard; you occasionally fight with the game when it wants you to, say, walk down a ladder instead of jump from rooftop to rooftop. But that’s a tunable/solvable problem.
Jimmy, what’s the problem with SecuRom 7?
I don’t trust a program that installs itself and runs with administrator rights even under accounts that don’t have those rights, so it can present a security risk. It cannot be uninstalled even when the program it came with is uninstalled; it must be removed manually, including a number of registry keys.
It can cause problems with some CD-burners, disk utilities, and anti-virus programs; as well as conflict with other copy-protection software.
SecuRom is developed by a unit of Sony, who gave us the rootkit CDs and fingerprint-verified memory sticks that used virus techniques to hide sensitive files on the computers on which they were used (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6968234.stm)
And while I am not aware of any PC game that uses what I am about to mention, SecuRom does promote on their site an optional add-on product for 1-to-1 marketing called n-CD (http://www.securom.com/solution_ncd.asp).
I agree with you about the tendency for PC developers to throw menus, seperate screens, and additional hotkeys at the UI. Keeping things as simple as possible is a good goal. Console schemes sometimes seem overly constrained to me, however. I love KOTOR, but the UI, while it works well most of the time, always seems to be the weak part of it (if you don’t count how the turret minigame).
I forgot to mentino in the part about n-CD that the fact that the hooks for this seem to be present makes me extremely nervous about it.
It’s interesting, in this context, to observe the recent announcement of Sins of a Solar Empire passing 100,000 sales in its first three weeks.
Surely not a huge lot by the scale of console game sales, but without knowing the details about the budget Sins was developed on, I suspect that their economics are anything but ugly.
I think game publishers need to get over the idea that it requires multi-millions of dollars to produce profitable games. But they’ve probably been pushing that idea for so long, now, that they believe in it themselves…
What a Difference Six Months Can Make // Aug 28, 2008 at 3:36 pm
[…] He wasn’t so positive about the platform last February. […]