17th November 2007, 10:25 PM
Oh come on, are you honestly going to say that the PC gaming industry is in as good shape now, overall quality and volume of titles wise, as it was in 2000? No way. Absolutely no way. Even so, the examples you came up with kind of prove my point, though, which, I would say, shows that I have a point here...
I was thinking of making exceptions saying that strategy games and FPSes are still common on the PC (virtually all the other genres outside of MMOs died out at retail years ago, excepting casual games), but I realized that most all such titles are also either European or are console ports or are simultaneously released on consoles, so though that was true until a few years ago I don't know if it is anymore...
The Witcher: European(German)-developed RPG. Primary market is Europe.
Tabula Rasa: MMO. The main genre US/Canadian developers support on the PC.
Civ IV: exception I guess, though as a strategy game it's in one of the most popular PC gaming genres and it's part of a long-running series.
Blizzard: I talked about Blizzard in my last post. Look at it again. "They went into MMOs" was my essential point.
Oh yeah, and do you know what Firaxis is working on now? Yeah, just like Ensemble, a console game. It will be Firaxis's first ever console-exclusive title.
The last developer in North America that made only high-budget PC-exclusive single-player RPGs was Troika Studios, who as I said in my last post went out of business two years ago. That pretty much sums up the situation. There are a few tiny web-distribution-only PC RPG developers out there, such as Spiderweb Software (look them up if you haven't before), but they don't exactly get games in stores... strategy games are in better shape than that, but are just as clearly far down from where they were in the '90s. FPSes are doing fine of course, because they're now shipping simultaneously on consoles... and the rest of the genres are pretty much totally gone. Wargames are only developed and sold by a few online-distribution-only (or maybe Europe-and-online?) publishers. Mech sims and space sims are totally dead. PC-only or even PC-first racing games still exist, but are rare. Just looking at the variety of games you would find on random PC Gamer demo discs from like 1997 or something and the "variety" of games released in the average month this year is pretty depressing...
There is an explanation for this, that I believe somewhat -- the rise of MMOs is at least partially responsible for this. The more people put into one game, the less they buy other games... when you're putting so much money into one game, paying a monthly fee, etc, it's much less likely that you will also buy and play a bunch of other stuff. I don't doubt that this is part of it... because overall the amount of money in PC gaming isn't decreasing, when online sales and fees are included; it's just retail sales that keep falling.
I was thinking of making exceptions saying that strategy games and FPSes are still common on the PC (virtually all the other genres outside of MMOs died out at retail years ago, excepting casual games), but I realized that most all such titles are also either European or are console ports or are simultaneously released on consoles, so though that was true until a few years ago I don't know if it is anymore...
The Witcher: European(German)-developed RPG. Primary market is Europe.
Tabula Rasa: MMO. The main genre US/Canadian developers support on the PC.
Civ IV: exception I guess, though as a strategy game it's in one of the most popular PC gaming genres and it's part of a long-running series.
Blizzard: I talked about Blizzard in my last post. Look at it again. "They went into MMOs" was my essential point.
Oh yeah, and do you know what Firaxis is working on now? Yeah, just like Ensemble, a console game. It will be Firaxis's first ever console-exclusive title.
The last developer in North America that made only high-budget PC-exclusive single-player RPGs was Troika Studios, who as I said in my last post went out of business two years ago. That pretty much sums up the situation. There are a few tiny web-distribution-only PC RPG developers out there, such as Spiderweb Software (look them up if you haven't before), but they don't exactly get games in stores... strategy games are in better shape than that, but are just as clearly far down from where they were in the '90s. FPSes are doing fine of course, because they're now shipping simultaneously on consoles... and the rest of the genres are pretty much totally gone. Wargames are only developed and sold by a few online-distribution-only (or maybe Europe-and-online?) publishers. Mech sims and space sims are totally dead. PC-only or even PC-first racing games still exist, but are rare. Just looking at the variety of games you would find on random PC Gamer demo discs from like 1997 or something and the "variety" of games released in the average month this year is pretty depressing...
There is an explanation for this, that I believe somewhat -- the rise of MMOs is at least partially responsible for this. The more people put into one game, the less they buy other games... when you're putting so much money into one game, paying a monthly fee, etc, it's much less likely that you will also buy and play a bunch of other stuff. I don't doubt that this is part of it... because overall the amount of money in PC gaming isn't decreasing, when online sales and fees are included; it's just retail sales that keep falling.
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