BioWare Interview, Part One

CVG has published the first portion of a new interview with BioWare’s Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk about the future of PC gaming.

Q: What do you look on as the strengths of the PC platform, and what’s your opinion of the PC gaming scene as it stands currently?

A: PC gaming has a number of tremendous strengths. First off, the installed base of systems – there are literally millions of PCs, probably hundreds of millions worldwide, potentially available as gaming systems. Now, not all are used for games – many are owned by non-gamers or are work systems – but there is still a large potential installed base for Vista and Windows gaming.

Second, PC systems are ever-expanding: the new console systems are awesome (and I am enjoying all of them in addition to my PC gaming!) but PC systems can and will catch up in terms of technology (graphics, physics, etc) in the next year as new video cards are released and players upgrade their systems.

The videogame market is very cyclical and PC and console gaming have an uneasy alliance – as new console systems are released, early adopter fans move over to check those games out and as PC systems reach and surpass console systems at the end of a console life cycle, a good number of those early adopter fans move back over to PC gaming. Console gaming is huge of course, especially when you add in hardware sales, but it’s hard to quantify the enormous impact of online gaming on the overall PC market – retail sales just don’t capture the revenues from the increasingly successful PC MMOs as well as digital distribution and episodic gaming (which are both gaining strength year after year).

PC gaming does tend to appeal to more “core” players (some games are exceptions of course) in part due to another strength – the input systems of mouse and keyboard, which enable a more “in-depth” interaction with players, arguably more complex, but also with more options easily accessible if you spend the time on designing a good interface. Games like World of Warcraft and other great MMOs can and will be designed for console but it’s somewhat easier for players to see the range of possible feature options on a PC system.

Next, PC systems tend (at least right now) to be more connected to the internet – this enables more players of online games and more consumers of digitally distributed post-release and episodic content on PC. That is evolving as more players go online in the console world of course (Xbox Live was at ~60% of all Xbox 360 users last I heard which is awesome) but for right now PC still holds the edge in online penetration. Overall I think both console and PC (and handheld and mobile too!) systems have distinct advantages and strengths so both are viable gaming systems. I know I play a lot of games on all of these systems myself so I’m certainly glad to have the range of available options!