Consoles vs. PC Games: The writing is on the wall

Historically the argument of PCs vs. Consoles as game machines was an artificial argument. The two appeals to very different demographics. Many gamers, such as myself, simply were not willing to tolerate playing games on a television. How can you go from playing at 1024x768 to what amounts to 512x384? (That's 1/4th the resolution).

But times are changing. More and more people are getting HDTV and many games are starting to support this. This trend definitely doesn't help the PC game market grow. And the statistics back that up. But there are still certain kinds of games that only make sense on the PC. They boil down to games that need a mouse or a keyboard.

• Real Time Strategy Games
• Turn based Strategy Games
• First Person Shooters
• Massive Multiplayer Games

I'm playing Knights of the Old Republic on the PC right now and it's painfully obviously that it was designed with a console in mind based on the annoying controls and inventory system. And the game suffers for it.

The issue isn't whether the PC game market will die. It won't. The issue is whether PC games will be able to keep up with console games from a production values point of view. The answer to that is sadly...no with a few exceptions. So let me illustrate this with a report from the year 2007.

By 2007 the only PC-only big budget games will be massively multiplayer games, which will be well on their way to becoming cross platform to consoles. First person shooters (Duke Nukem Forever won't be out yet though) and the occasional RTS. And RTS, btw, won't be considered "big budget" anymore either by that point. With DirectX 9 or later, you can actually create your own pretty decent 3D engine.  Give me a team of 10 people (5 programmers, 5 artists) and I'll give you a Warcraft III clone in 18 months that has better graphics.  Warcraft III, of course, didn't have all the advantages that came into being with the more recent DirectX's so it's not that we're smarter, it's that it's gotten easier.

What this means though, from a retail point of view, is that when you go into the store to buy a game, it will be totally dominated by console games with a tiny area for PC games that will have (Wait for it) some sort of RTS, the first person shooter, the MMORPG, and a few other popular PC games that are either cross platform or fall into some unique category.

This, of course, is what PC advocates fear. But I'm afraid it's inevitable. It's not that the PC market is dying. It's not and it's annoying when people try to argue that. The problem is that retailers can make more money on console games than PC games because console games have been growing in sales much faster than PC games have.

Why Console Games are taking over retail

When I was a kid, my game machine was a Commodore 64. After the Atari 5200 and Colecovision's of the world died off, the console  market was gone. Then one day Nintendo introduced the NES but it didn't really matter because they couldn't remotely compete with computers yet in any important category. Gamers were willing to put up with the pain of freeing up more of that last 384K of "Upper memory" to get Wing Commander to work. They were willing to tolerate Ultima VI's annoying proprietary pseudo-OS.  They were willing to put up looking through the user manual of Power Monger to look up the copy protection key every freaking time they wanted to play. There wasn't really an alternative.

Eventually Windows and CD-ROMs made life on the PC easier. And it was good. For awhile. When the Playstation was released consoles started to get more competitive. But they still couldn't hold a candle to the PC in many areas. Outside crummy arcadey games, now in quasi-3D, the consoles were still not very appealing.

But now, even I have a console. Sure, Nintendo gave me one for free for helping them create a Nintendo Desktop (our non-game side of the business) but I do play it now. I've bought games for it. The latest generation of consoles have graphics that are "good enough". And with HDTV and the next-gen of consoles looming, they are poised to overtake or at least be equal to the latest/greatest PC games in visual quality.

And they already outsell most PC games.  So what are the reasons for this? Why not just keep using a PC for games? Why are developers moving to consoles?

1. PCs are still relatively painful to use. The typical Windows user's computer barely boots. Come on, you know what I'm talking about. Many of you reading this are someone's "computer bitch" who goes over to their friends and neighbors houses to "fix" their computers. You get over there and find that 50+ spyware, DDOS clients, and other crap are being loaded on start-up. That Internet Explorer is so full of spam toolbars that you can barely see the page and the desktop is covered with icons.  And then you get the game and have to install it.  My Knights of the Old Republic took 30 minutes to install on my brand new Dell 2.8 GHz machine. Compare that with just putting in a CD and having it work.
2. Copy Protection. Someone on Quarter To Three actually had a good solution to this. But it's not generally utilized.  Forcing people to have the CD in the drive negates the one major advantage PC games have - that you install them on the hard drive.  If I'm on-line, I shouldn't have to have the CD in the drive. Just have it contact some master server to "activate" it automatically. If they aren't on the net then sure, have the CD be in the drive. But this way at least those in the majority would never have to mess with copy protection in any real way.  I wouldn't mind having to have the CD in the drive if I wasn't forced to install some 1 gig game to my hard disk before playing it.
3. PERSONAL computers vs. PUBLIC televisions. My Game Cube can be played by my 3 year old son without any intervention from me. My 6 year old regularly plays Zelda on his own. But do I want these guys on my computer with their sticky hands? No way. And most people can't afford to have a "kid's computer" nor would they understand the logic of having one.
4. Cost. The Game Cube is $99. A decent gaming rig is going to set you back $1000. Sure, you can do more with the computer but so what? If you're not doing games, a 5 year old PC will do most of the work that normal people do with a computer. This is almost certainly the biggest reason why consoles have gotten such huge numbers. How can you argue against $99 for a console that comes with games on it?

So then why are developers moving to writing for consoles?

1. Numbers. That's pretty obvious. As the number of users on consoles grows, the demand grows and so go the developers.
2. The rise of cross platform libraries like Renderware. Now it's much easier to write once and with some minor tweaks have your game on all 3 major game platforms.
3. Life for the developer can be easier. If you're a game developer on the PC, you're in a tough land. Our company has a hit game, Galactic Civilizations. If you knew how little we make per unit sold at retail you'd cry. I know I am. Makes me want to just give it up and move to consoles myself. It is becoming incredibly difficult, nearly impossible, to make a retail-level PC-only game that isn't one of the huge genres (RTS, MMORPG, FPS) and not go broke. And even then, only the successful ones make any money. Let me be plain: If it were not for the fine print in our contract that allows us to sell Galactic Civilizations directly, not only would we not consider a sequel, we would have had to lay off our entire gaming side immediately. That's just how screwed up the system is for PC game developers right now. Let me put it this way: 100,000 units are expected to sell at retail world wide, total revenue from those retail sales is expected to be LESS than $400,000. That is less than the revenue we received from direct sales which sold less than 10% as many units. That's not a viable business model.
4. Support. Tech support on a PC game is significantly higher than on a console where the games "just work".
5. Piracy. It's not a huge deal on the PC but it is higher than it is on the console. My neighbor has a Game Cube. You think she's going to go onto some site and try to figure out how to pirate Game Cube games? She won't bother with PC games because of the previously mentioned "hassles".
6. Difficulty in getting published. The "big" publishers are increasingly preferring to move to the model of only releasing a handful of huge titles per year rather than many smaller ones. There is a certain logic in that. Today, most expenses come from marketing, not development. If those marketing dollars can be focused on fewer games they can end up with bigger bang for the buck, in theory anyway.  As much as we'd love to have a mega publisher pick up a Galactic Civilizations II (assuming we could work something out where 100,000 units in sales translates into real revenue for us) we're not going to count on it.  We'll either have to look at doing it ourselves (the whole thing) or work something out with a smaller publisher where retail sales work out better for us.
7. Support from the console maker. No one really cares if you make a PC game. But Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony care a lot if you make a cool game for their platform. Matching funds and other help are available to developers. There's nothing like that on the PC except in the increasingly rare cases where the publisher provides advances on royalties.

 PC Games in twilight? No.

Does this mean that PC gaming is doomed though? Not at all. But if PC gamers and developers want to continue buying and making PC games, some recognition of the changing reality is in order.

Electronic Purchasing. Yes. Sorry but PC gamers are going to have to stop bitching about the lack of diversity in games available at the local store. It ain't changing. There are lots of PC games in development and released each year that no one ever hears about because they are sold electronically. This is something we're trying to do with Drengin.net. The goal is to allow people to buy all the games or cherry pick the ones they want off of it. Think of it as iTunes for games except you have an option to also pay to access everything that's on there at 18 month increments. Over the next year, we hope to add a lot more games to the library but we've run into snags there which I'll bring up next.

Developers need realistic expectations. We thought it would be easy. We would talk to game developers whose games were already available on-line but had only sold a few copies. The 2002 winner of the Indie Games Festival sold <100 units of their game for instance.  So we would go out and try to bring games onto Drengin.net.  Suddenly though they wanted huge bucks for their game. 

Our standard deal was:

1) Non-exclusivity - you can sell it still on your own.

2) We'd give you a couple thousand dollars advance on royalties -- often more than the game had made total so far (I know that's hard to believe but it's true, most of these cool little games out there have sold only tiny numbers of units).

3) We would give you a royalty off of the total sales of Drengin.net for a set time period.

But more important than that, gamers will have to get over their fixation of buying boxed copies. If you are willing to only purchase PC games at the store, your options will be steadily decreasing. In the long term, electronic sales are the way to go.  We sell millions of dollars of software electronically each year -- Object Desktop and its components (the non-game version of Drengin.net -- even uses the same program manager Stardock Central). So we know it's doable.  But if PC gamers can't make that transition, the increasingly the only retail games they'll be able to purchase will be in those genres that the PC specializes in (RTS, FPS, MMORPG).

As a PC game developer, we're rapidly reaching a fork in the road. If we can make more selling 10,000 units direct where we don't have to make boxes, don't have to deal with nearly the tech support hassles, have less piracy issues, than selling 100,000 units at retail, then it doesn't take long to realize that maybe if we were on-line only we might "only" sell 20,000 copies instead of the 110,000 total but we'd make more than twice as much as we did the other way. The problem would be that it would be one less PC game on store shelves thus making console games appear even more successful. But I don't see many alternatives.

Of course, none of this is going to happen this year or next year. I'm speaking of the long run here. But console games clearly have a positive feedback cycle going. One that I see only accelerating.