Unfettered Blather

I mentioned in an earlier post that I think a lot of the PC games industry suffers from self-inflicted wounds. There is a lot of denial out there that PC games is becoming an increasingly niche market. If the market isn’t “dying” it is certainly sick and needs some attention.

A recent purchase of Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, highlights one of the biggest problems that PC games face on the market right now. Take away the dominance of console games in advertising and public consciousness right away, assume the consumer seeks after a PC gaming experience, what awaits them when they purchase a product could be enough to make them seek alternatives. That, ultimately, is the problem with GalCiv2.

The game itself has some healthy buzz going for it, and with the disappointment of Master of Orion 3 coupled with a genuine following for that style of game, it would seem that GalCiv2 has a pretty good formula for success. It is a sequel to an established title filling in a very empty gap in the market that has an active demand. It’s a strong formula for success and I have no doubt that GalCiv2 will see a profit, but it may hurt other titles like it or even a GalCiv3.

Up to this point I really haven’t gone into specifics as to what the obstacles are, but that’s because it’s a tale as old as time, or at least games on the PC. I get the game, I go through the install process, I meet all the requirements, and yet I run the game and it doesn’t work. It just flat out refuses to run. Now, for just a second, let’s ignore why it won’t run because I’ll get to that in a second. Can you imagine this on a console? It does happen, but cases are extremely rare and it has usually been done due to a change in the media format than because of any problem with the console or game itself. A consumer buys a game, loads it on their machine, and it doesn’t work. Is there any bigger turn off? As it turns out, it wasn’t an uncommon problem either, which just makes the situation worse. I’ve had games not run before, but the circumstances involved were so rare that it only affected a very small, yet often vocal, number of users. If you’re not used to these sorts of idiosyncracies of PC games, if you’re just a casual consumer, then the effect this is going to leave will be overwhelmingly negative. In fact, it’s justification for taking the game back right then and there and hoping the place takes returns on opened merchandise.

The problem specifically keeping the game from running was an out-of-date video driver, which is just all the dumber in my mind. You don’t have to constantly update drivers on consoles and I have never understood why we’re constantly bombared with Direct X and driver updates on the PC. It is just another hurdle that PC gamers face that their console brethren never see. When the next logical step happens, which is the interface for real-time, turn-based, and other genres is solved for consoles, then what is going to keep those games on the PC?

I’m sure there is a reason why I have to update my drivers, but I don’t know what it is really. There is usually some rumbling about performance and efficiency, but I have yet to be able to tell the difference except for a couple of catastrophic Direct X releases. Is the casual consumer going to understand why they have to update their drivers? Will they even keep the game around long enough to care? More importantly, when the next game like it comes out, will they even bother to buy it?

You might be able to get users to deal with bugs, crash to desktops, poor performance, and other problems once the game is installed, and believe me when I say that GalCiv2 has all these problems as well. However, if they can’t even get the game to work, if they get that initial error message, the battle is already lost.

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