Game Devs On the Future of PC Gaming 375
Shacknews wraps up a developer panel at PAX East discussing the future of gaming on the PC. They cover topics including DRM, digital download platforms and cloud-based gaming services.
"Joe Kreiner of Terminal Reality: 'If you look at it from a giant publisher perspective, then the numbers on the PC just really don't make financial sense for you to bother with it. But if you start out with the mindset — you know, you're targeting that group, you make a niched product that's going [to] do well, if you look at a lot of the titles on Steam, Torchlight's a really good example — as long as you know that's your audience to begin with, and you make something inside of a budget that you know you're going to be selling those kinds of numbers, you can be very successful. I think it just takes a targeted developer. ... There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"
Re:Or, if they want people to buy them.. (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure that ME1 is a good example, the vehicle controls sucked no matter what platform you used - the mechanics for it were awful.
Re:These guys are as bad as the movie industry (Score:3, Informative)
And the two games on that list that I am interested in, Assassins Creed 2 and Settlers 7, are both out of the question for me as they have an always-on-the-net requirement, and I'm looking for single-player games to play on my laptop in the hotel room, or at a friend's house who doesn't have wireless internet. When I do have net access, I play World of Warcraft, I'm not looking for a game to fill that time with. Until this year, I was in their target market. Now I am not, because of the new DRM. The game I most play at the moment is Carmageddon 2, I found my disk a couple of weeks ago and got it working and it's awesome.
Re:Right (Score:2, Informative)
Yep, and Activision Blizzard are the second largest gaming company in the world, riding WoW roughshod into the ground.
They are still only the second biggest gaming company in the world, after Nintendos' gaming console empire...
http://www.softwaretop100.org/component/content/article/250-Top-25-largest-game-software-companies-in-the-world [softwaretop100.org]