The 'Death' of PC Gaming

Heres a short article I've just written for my university newspaper, and thought you guys might enjoy it.

The death of PC gaming is a phrase I hear thrown around a lot these days, and not by people who play on computers. It seems to be the common opinion that consoles have completely taken over and there remains a last, battered few who still persist with the PC. I come before you as a PC player to explore the actual evidence behind this - am I part of a dying breed or a largely unknown yet thriving community?

Let’s start by having a look at some of PC gaming’s biggest giants. Routinely, when polls are held as to which developer is the best across all platforms, three come out on top – Blizzard, Valve and Bioware. These three also happen to be some of the biggest PC games developers. Blizzard, in itself, is a PC only company making huge titles such as the Starcraft, Diablo and Warcraft series (including World of Warcraft). The console arm of Blizzard is Activision – the makers of most of the recent Call of Duty franchise. Their projected earnings for 2010 were around $4.28 billion, a staggering amount.

Starcraft 2: product of a dying platform? I don't think so.

Valve, as well as developing genre-definers such as Half Life and Counter Strike, provides the Steam service. Steam is a program that allows you to download and subsequently run games through it, including most large games released by any developer. Steam users at last count were over 30 million and Valve made an estimated $1 billion last year. Bioware are well known master story tellers producing Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights. However, both Valve and Bioware have only made tentative steps towards console platforms. Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, had previously derided Sony’s Playstation but has now mysteriously changed his mind (I’m sure you can guess the reason we all suspect). Bioware are just getting round to releasing the phenomenal Mass Effect 2 on Playstation, but the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series remain the companies’ only stabs at the Playstation and Xbox. The developers seem to appreciate there is clearly a lot of money in the console arena, but their aim still seems to be to cater to PC users.

There is also an incredibly strong community within PC gaming. A perfect example of this is the game Minecraft. So far, by attracting the interest of the community alone, it has more than a million players and hundreds of mods being pumped out for it. What makes it special is the fact that it has not even been released! It is produced by the tiny, new developer Mojang Specifications, and is available to buy online and play as a beta version (the stage before full release). Modders, people who independently produce modifications for games, provide new ways to play any game and near infinite replayability. The mod ‘Defense of the Ancients’ for Warcraft 3 became so popular it has spawned an entire new genre of games, and Valve’s hit Counter Strike began as a mod.

I don’t look at it as the death of PC gaming, I see it as the rise of console gaming. PC gaming will always be more of a niche appeal, something that provides for a community of modders and dedicated players with their own culture. Consoles however, have far more accessibility, being both cheaper and a lot easier to use. It’s no surprise that this is a winning formula, but the ascendancy of one platform does not crush another, especially when it has the most dedicated user base of all. Whatever happens, do not write us off.

Counter Strike: a child of all that is good about the PC community.