The State of Things
As I reported over at TotalGaming.net where I work as the Game News guy, Cyan, the creators of the popular Myst series has had to shutdown. Its not because the games they make nowadays suck, but because they couldn't get funding for future products. Few games have sold like the original Myst, a 12 million seller which wasn't topped on the PC charts until The Sims, 5 years later.
The problem really is two-fold in my opinion. For one thing the PC gaming market is getting absolutley CRUSHED be their console counterpart and I can see why. A console cost at the max $400 including the upcoming Xbox 360, and once you have it thats all you need, and it doesn't need to be tricked out. A good gaming machine, even made custom by me lets say (yes I have made many and no one has complained, even had a kid return his NEW Alienware system because a system I had built blew his $3000 machine out of the water) and cheaply would run you around $1000. That's a $600 difference and in a few years you will have to upgrade it for another couple hundred or buy a new system. With gaming coming into the mainstream market that means lower income houses are gaming more, and will obviously opt for the cheaper route, as many people WITH money will still do the same. Game developers also realize this and see that more people have consoles, so they just make games for the larger market, and occasionly will port titles to the PC.
The other problem is that the PC market is so open, theres simply no advocate for the development of games on the PC. Each console has that first party (the game developers who are owned by the console's creator) who often makes some of the best titles and keeps the systems afloat when they need it. No manufacturer supports their system as much as Nintendo, so much so that its almost overkill but thats not my point. My point is that there is no Nintendo or Sony in the PC world, there is a Microsoft but they are obviously concentrating mostly on their Xbox with few games being developed for PC and no really good ones except Age of Empires III.
These two things have caused many people to believe that the PC gaming industry is doomed and will evaporate at some point in time. I certainly wouldn't go that far, just look at how well Blizzard and Sierra, both companies owned by Vivendi Universal, a company that can't keep itself together and yet both game companies have raked in the dough with Blizzard recently announcing that World of Warcraft has more than 4 million paying customers, thats people still paying a monthly fee to play the game, not the total sales. Unfortunately for Cyan, the option of branching out to consoles just to keep an influx of money coming while creator blockbusters for the PC is no longer an option, but something that the lesser known PC developers may want to look at. Diversifying is good.
The problem really is two-fold in my opinion. For one thing the PC gaming market is getting absolutley CRUSHED be their console counterpart and I can see why. A console cost at the max $400 including the upcoming Xbox 360, and once you have it thats all you need, and it doesn't need to be tricked out. A good gaming machine, even made custom by me lets say (yes I have made many and no one has complained, even had a kid return his NEW Alienware system because a system I had built blew his $3000 machine out of the water) and cheaply would run you around $1000. That's a $600 difference and in a few years you will have to upgrade it for another couple hundred or buy a new system. With gaming coming into the mainstream market that means lower income houses are gaming more, and will obviously opt for the cheaper route, as many people WITH money will still do the same. Game developers also realize this and see that more people have consoles, so they just make games for the larger market, and occasionly will port titles to the PC.
The other problem is that the PC market is so open, theres simply no advocate for the development of games on the PC. Each console has that first party (the game developers who are owned by the console's creator) who often makes some of the best titles and keeps the systems afloat when they need it. No manufacturer supports their system as much as Nintendo, so much so that its almost overkill but thats not my point. My point is that there is no Nintendo or Sony in the PC world, there is a Microsoft but they are obviously concentrating mostly on their Xbox with few games being developed for PC and no really good ones except Age of Empires III.
These two things have caused many people to believe that the PC gaming industry is doomed and will evaporate at some point in time. I certainly wouldn't go that far, just look at how well Blizzard and Sierra, both companies owned by Vivendi Universal, a company that can't keep itself together and yet both game companies have raked in the dough with Blizzard recently announcing that World of Warcraft has more than 4 million paying customers, thats people still paying a monthly fee to play the game, not the total sales. Unfortunately for Cyan, the option of branching out to consoles just to keep an influx of money coming while creator blockbusters for the PC is no longer an option, but something that the lesser known PC developers may want to look at. Diversifying is good.