The Death of PC Gaming – Again

IGN AU continues the “death of PC gaming” debate by pointing out the platform’s many strengths while also featuring commentary from PopCap’s Giordano Contestabile and Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime – two people who have seen firsthand just how successful PC games can be.

The PC, then, has its own innate strengths as a platform, and is also financially attractive for companies like Blizzard. According to Morhaime: “Right now it’s a big advantage for a game like World of Warcraft, which I think would be technologically really challenging to implement on any of the other platforms.” And with its massive install base (“You look at the install base of all these different gaming platforms, there’s nothing that even touches the PC,” he says), the PC should still be a force to be reckoned with. Blizzard is particularly adept at catering to the unique strengths of the platform, but the company’s success is proof that there’s life in the platform yet, and also proof that as Ron Curry puts it: “good content will find its audience.”

But what of piracy, that traditional bugbear of PC gaming? While its impact has certainly been huge on PC, with no real market for legitimate games in many parts of the world and easy access to ISOs and cracks online, its impact can be minimised. Valve’s Steam service ties in all sorts of valuable extra features and functionality to make owning a legitimate copy more appealing, whereas Blizzard has taken a few different approaches. “We don’t really have a piracy problem with World of Warcraft,” Mike Morhaime explained. “Traditionally it has been a huge problem, especially in certain markets which were less developed. When we released Warcraft III we made a conscious decision to try and break into the China market and we fully localised the game into Chinese, and offered it at a very low price to compete with the pirate market, because otherwise nobody would buy it. And it was a very successful strategy, and we sold a lot of legitimate copies of the game, helped to build the brand and kind of paved the way for World of Warcraft afterwards.” Is the decision not to include LAN support in StarCraft II also partly an anti-piracy measure? Quite possibly, but maybe that’s what’s needed to ensure a title’s viability.

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All hope is not lost, then, for the PC. In terms of more ‘traditional’ games, this is still a very viable platform, provided the content fits. We’ve already discussed several of the faces of the PC platform, but it’s really important to underline once more just how broad a cross-section of gaming experiences the PC plays host to. It’s not all levelling up Night Elves, shooting Nazis in the face and scratching your beard in front of the latest genre-busting indie title. The PC also thrives in the area of more casual games. Indeed, the IEAA’s Ron Curry thinks that the platform’s demographic is changing: “While the PC games market as a whole has slowed we have seen that the typical audience for a PC game has shifted somewhat. While traditionally PC gaming has been a male dominated platform, we see for example more mums playing games on a PC. This female audience are more likely to play social games on the PC which then serves as an introduction to more traditional PC gaming.”