Unfettered Blather

I gave up on PC gaming some years back. I won’t go into details why but consoles have been my primary focus for gaming since 2003. I play the occassional PC game but it has been more of a novelty.

Every now and again the PC grognards will rally together and insist that the PC will once again dominate the market. Reasons like having the biggest install base, the ease of development, etc. etc. We’re all very familiar with the laundry list. Yet despite all these advantages, the people who actually publish PC games not only continue to fail to learn from their mistakes but insist on making new ones. It is not that I do not believe in the PC as a platform, I simply lost all faith in the people who are creating content for it to do so effectively.

The other assertion is that services like Steam will help a resurgence in PC gaming, but the problem no one seems to have bothered to notice is that Steam is still not that well known and entirely dependent on consumers having prior knowledge of Steam. Steam faces a real chicken and egg problem. If your product only exists on-line, how do people find out about it? The Internet still exists as a vast and nigh impenetrable sewer of content and the rare diamonds like Valve, who own Steam, have trouble getting their message out to the masses. There is a very good reason Valve still sells retail boxed copies and have ported over most of their games to consoles.

However, even if you get the retail brick and mortar stores back and get publishers to stop making lame-brained decisions, the real problem is that the PC is not going to be a viable platform for much longer.

Let me be clear, the PC as a platform is going away.

When was the last time you booted up your mainframe to run a program someone had written for you in assembler. How many people wouldn’t even understand what I just said? Today’s PC desktop is going to quickly go the way of yesterday’s mainframe computer. Even laptops are going to be considered large and clunky. The contemporary blackberry or equivalent device does many of the functions that people use an office PC for and does them just as well. We already have docking stations for laptops so what is preventing someone from being able to hook up their blackberry to something similar and having access to a full size monitor, keyboard, and mouse. That set-up would easily allow the average office worker to do the exact same tasks on a piece of hardware that fits in their pocket. The iPhone, despite all its flaws, allows someone to surf the web just fine. These devices are not powerful and not designed for the game experiences we are used to. Sure, games will exist for these devices. Show me an extensible electronic device that someone hasn’t figured out how to turn into a toy. Even early GPS devices had a type of game developed for them. Not software, but people found a way to “play” with them. That is not the point, the blackberries and iPhones are not designed first and foremost as game platforms. You might be able to squeeze something equivalent to the DS or PSP into them, but that will be the extent of it.

So where will we get our games from? Consoles? No, in the long run the market will tire of the current multi-platform mayhem. I’m not bemoaning the current state, I’ve long held that the three way competition has been beneficial to gamers but eventually someone is going to emerge dominant, and from there we’ll just integrate the winning concepts into some other device. What we need is a gaming standard, and that hasn’t emerged yet but it will. Video games are a huge market and unlikely to go anywhere, but how we play videogames today will be quite different. Say what you will about the Wii, but compare it to the Atari 2600 and it is indeed one high-tech piece of gear. Inconceivable back in the 80’s.

Specifically though, how would PC gaming make a comeback when the PC platform is shrinking? The very concept of the personal computer is now obsolescent and will likely be obsolete in five to ten years. From a long term business perspective it is a bad investment. The time for the resurgence was ten years ago, now there may not even be ten years left.

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