11th March 2010, 7:28 PM
Quote:some companies you can look at their time line and see they made three or four PC titles with a small team before getting on consoles and making dozens of successful games and increasing their development studios that all had nothing to do with 2004's World of Social Anxiety Craft or Tom Clancey's Combat Simulator with a Story series.
Half of this makes absolutely no sense and is misinformed, and the other half is just wrong. Either explain yourself better or actually respond to some of my points.
If I can guess though, essentially you're saying that anyone who made games that console gamers didn't like was stupid or something? I don't know, I can't understand your point at all... if that's what you're saying it's almost too stupid to even deserve a reply, but I'm not really sure what you even mean.
Electronic gaming was invented in the US. From 1946 to the early 1980s, all of the major advances in electronic gaming happened here. Everyone else was playing catchup. The first PC game was American, from 1962. The first arcade game American, from 1972. The first videogame console American, from 1972. And then the first significantly successful console American, from 1977. But in the late '70s and early '80s, though there were many American companies making videogames, none of them thought of videogames alone as the answer. They all thought that the actual goal was a hybrid computer-console system, or perhaps just a computer alone, and that the consoles were just a transition or a hook to get people into their "real" business, the computers. Computers were serious pieces of equipment with real uses, after all, not just games machines. And so, before the crash we saw things like Coleco's Adam computer addon, the Intellivision computer addon, the Atari 5200 being a consolized Atari 400/800 computer essentially, etc.
Then, in 1983-84, the Western console industry crashed. It would be famously brought back by Nintendo in 1985-86, but in fact gaming never went away -- because those computers didn't crash. The IBM PC, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and more, all had significant market shares and large games markets through the '80s and into the early '90s (Only the PC would get beyond that, in the early '90s all the competitors except for Mac died off). So the standard story, that Nintendo saved gaming, isn't precisely true... computer gaming never went away and never crashed. This is obviously important -- as a result of this Western development was focused on the PC, and this only very slowly changed until after the launch of the PS2.
As I said, there weren't many good NES games from Western developers... but there were LOTS of great PC games during that era. I'd list a lot, but you've probably never heard of them because you don't know PC games. Adventure games (text, graphical, and FMV-based), RPGs, platformers, strategy games, space sims, wargames, military vehicular sims, later on FPSes, and more... there were a huge variety of titles on the PC, and a lot of the games had big budgets for the time, certainly comparable and almost certainly above the budgets of your average probably junky Western-developed console game then! If you're bashing all of those games, it is only through ignorance.
So, the '80s were really good for PC gaming. In the '90s consoles continued to grow in popularity, but despite that, PC gaming stayed successful through the decade. Now, here's an important point -- PC games did not sell like console games. That is, console games are now and always have been heavily front-loaded -- the majority of sales happen in the first week. PC games just weren't like that. You would release a game wiht the expectation that it would be on the shelves for years and sell slowly over that period of time, and that is exactly what happened. Back in the early or mid '90s you could go into any Software ETC and see large numbers of games that came out years ago there on the shelves being sold new. People played PC games for longer on average than console games because they often had much more content thanks to things like level editors, online/modem multiplayer, etc., and they did not always buy them right when they came out.
However, by the late '90s computer game developers and publishers were getting bigger, but the market wasn't growing enough to satisfy them, so they started looking more seriously at other markets. Company after company started moving towards consoles, lured by the large number of gamers and the promise of more immediate dollars than they were getting on the PC.
As for genre diversity, it held up through the '90s. FPSes became more and more popular, but wargames, military sims, platformers, top-down action games, turnbased and realtime strategy games, graphic adventures, life sims, puzzle games, life/building sims (SimCity, etc), and more were all there to provide a massive amount of variety. Over time adventure games did fade and FPSes and RTSes become more prominent, but the other genres did not entirely disappear yet.
One of the crucial developments happened in the mid '90s when MMOs arrived on the scene in a big way after Ultima Online was released. The genre had always been around in the MUD form, but UO (and Meridian 59 before it, though that one was much less successful) was a new breed, a graphical, large-scale massively multiplayer online RPG. The game was a massive hit and is still operating today. EverQuest a few years later compounded that and the MMO craze was on. I do think that this had an important role in what happened to PC gaming -- because in terms of raw dollars, PC games never actually decreased in income. It's just that an increasingly large amount of that money, and gaming time, went into MMOs, with their monthly fees and massive timesinks. There was less and less room for other kinds of games to have much of a market.
Still, adventure games, space sims and wargames lasted past the early years of the MMORPG without entirely disappearing... but by 2001, all three were obviously on their last legs. Wargames and adventure games survived as low-budget titles developed by small, often Eastern European developers, but space sims, being a big budget only genre essentially, just died off, as did some others. Non-MMO RPGs of course did not die off, but became less common. I don't know how much of a connection there is between this stuff and the move towards a console-first focus, but as both things were happening at the same time I can't help but think there must be some connection...
And meanwhile, at the same time, the 6th generation of consoles (PS2, Xbox, GC, DC) simply simply was far too successful and popular to ignore... as I said above, the PC developers were lured in, I believe, by both the narrowing PC market (thanks to MMOs and the huge success of specific strategy and FPS games that pushed smaller developers out) and by increasing budgets, that made PC game development much more difficult on the scale it had previously existed on. You needed to sell a lot more units now in order to make money, and they didn't think they were doing that on just the PC... but I think greed had a big part of it too, they saw this big other market being more successful tha never and wanted in. And then after some moved over, more and more followed them and it snowballed into the situation we see today.
Also the console market is much more controlled, and as publishers got larger and wanted more power, that was definitely attractive. I mean, arguably computers are at their best when they are open and accessible. On consoles there are rules and restrictions. Anyone can make a computer game, but that isn't true on consoles. Back in the '80s these rules turned off Western developers, who went to great lengths to try to avoid paying Nintendo and Sega's licensing fees (look up Atari/Tengen v. Nintendo, Accolade v. Sega, and the EA/Sega deal that got them on the Genesis -- in all three cases the companies used their own technology to create carts that would work on those systems without a license. In EA's case they used that as leverage to get lower licensing fees out of Sega.). By the early '00s though, the corporate cultures of those companies had obviously changed dramatically and the console environment was much more inviting. Of course lower licensing fees and less hurdles played a part, but there were still some so that can't be the complete answer. Perhaps the dollar signs overwhelmed their caution, or the reductions in fees and such were enough for them... I'm not sure.
I don't really know the complete answer, there were obviously a lot of factors involved in why it happened... I'm just trying to think of things that were probably factors. The things I'm talking about were probably all involved, to some degree or another. I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions though, because all this is still very rough and incomplete, semi-stream-of-consciousness stuff.
Of course, now that budget problem has hit them again, and worse, because even PS360PC development doesn't always make their money back, and game development costs just keep skyrocketing upwards... what do they do now? :)