Thursday, January 17, 2008

Is PC Gaming Dead? +

Originally Posted by Horizon:
PCs also have the advantage of being moddable.
This is a great point because it gets at why there are consoles in the first place.

All the major console manufacturers -- Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft -- are also major game publishers. If they can get you to spend several hundred dollars (or your local equivalent) on their particular hardware, it dramatically increases the likelihood that you'll buy their games. So it's to their advantage to do anything they can to make you believe that locking yourself into their hardware is actually some kind of benefit to you.

Because no PC game developer also owns the hardware, there's no megacorporation with a vested interest in promoting PC hardware as a game platform. Instead, all three of the major console makers collaborate (indirectly, I'm sure) to run down the PC as a gaming platform because they don't control it.

Personally, that's one of the reasons I prefer the PC as a gaming platform: I see consoles as nothing more than customer-control tactics. A truly good game would run on many platforms because it can be expected to sell well there; a game that's "exclusive" to some console is a naked attempt to decide for me what hardware and software I should use.

No, thanks.

I'll stick with the PC, where the big, deep, rich, sprawling, moddable games I enjoy still flourish, despite BioWare's shafting PC gamers for months with Mass Effect.

"They may take our games... but they'll never take... our KEYBOARDS!"