The surge in popularity of console games has pushed PC games to the back of the shop.
Over the weekend I took a trip down to my local GAME store. After taking a brief glance at the various posters in the window, that were advertising bundle deals for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii, I walked through the entrance, brushing past the huge Mario cardboard cut-out, and paused at the front of the store to take a gander at the shelves crammed full of the latest video games.Taking a look to the left, I was greeted with rows of Xbox 360 games. To my right, with a pile of empty PS3 boxes piled up underneath, were the latest PS3 titles. Traveling a bit further into the centre of the shop I came face-to-face with a huge selection of Wii games and peripherals where sweaty teens gathered around debating whether to buy Mario-something-or-other with their pocket money.
A bit further down the aisle, to the back of the store, I finally came across the "graveyard" for PC games, where Sims: Castaway Stories, Sims Pets, Sims: Kitchen & Bathroom, Sims: Tramps On The Move and a dozen other Sims titles sat glumly next to the bargain bucket, where you could pick up a copy of Unreal Tournament III for just £9.99.
PC gaming is great if you’re technically minded and have the patience of a saint, but it’s clear to see from this one short trip to a game store that consumers just aren’t buying PC games by the same volumes any more. Of course,digital delivery through the likes of STEAM must account for the lack of activity in the stores, but until NPD include these figures in the official sales counts it's difficult to know exactly how many PC games are selling well. One thing's for sure, the surge in popularity of console games has pushed them to the back of the videogame shops at least.
The Xbox 360 and PS3 in particular have the power to offer online functionality, great visuals and carry powerful game engines so it’s no wonder that gamers are plumping for popping a disc into a slot and getting their game running within seconds without having to deal with install times, patch downloads and the upgrading of their machines to cope with the latest games. Publishers have also noticed the drop in sales and haven't been supporting PC games half as much as they have done in the past.
They’ll always be PC games because the technology moves so much faster than consoles and they’ll also be some developer seeking to push the boundaries of the machines, but even the likes of the first person shooter Crysis, which was marketed as being of the greatest games of all time in 2007, and was a title that EA spent millions of pounds advertising, has yet to achieve the same high sales figures as the top console titles, such as Gears of War, Halo 3, Resistance Fall of Man and a number of Wii titles.
Anyone who was brought up or has spent a considerable amount of time playing PC games will want developers to keep producing amazing games for the PC, and so indeed will those companies who have a vested interest in the technology.
The good news is that PC gaming may be on the verge of new era, if reports from Dean Kahashi at The San Jose Mercury prove to be correct. He’s reporting that the likes of Microsoft, NVIDIA Intel and AMD are on the verge of announcing a consortium entitled the PC Gaming Alliance.
Kahashi reports that : “The companies are preparing the announcement in advance of next week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Part of the pitch is that the industry group will keep the PC competitive with game consoles to attract key game developers.
The industry consortium will focus on fixing problems that make the PC a less desirable platform than consoles for playing games. Gamers, for instance, never really know whether a game will run well on their computers until they buy the game and install it on their machines at home.
Microsoft, Intel and other players have been working on these problems, namely with Microsoft's Games for Windows program launched last year. But the consortium will coordinate and expand those efforts to improve the experience of playing games on computers.
Let’s hope that the PC Gaming Alliance can put their heads together and come up with a plan to make the PC a more desirable platform for developers once more.
The full report can be found at Mercury News.
Edited: 18:39, 13th Feb 2008: The way I wrote about Crysis suggested that EA would be disappointed with a million sales, when of course I don't know whether that is true. I've amended the article to read: Crysis "has yet to achieve the same high sales figures as the top console titles."
