Industry Insiders Say: PC Games Are Held Back By Consoles (So What?)

Developing games for PC and con­sole mar­kets are two dif­fer­ent tasks but as more and more titles become parts of multi-platform fran­chises that need to fare as best as pos­si­ble in terms of total sales, game stu­dios have to sac­ri­fice the ambi­tion to develop each ver­sion to the full poten­tial of its native plat­form and accept some com­pro­mises in order to make their games as acces­si­ble as pos­si­ble for dif­fer­ent audiences.

One aspect of mod­ern games that may suf­fer because of it is how advanced their graph­i­cal form will be. Cervat Yerli of Crytek claims that:

“As long as the cur­rent con­sole gen­er­a­tion exists and as long as we keep push­ing the PC as well, the more dif­fi­cult it will be to really get the ben­e­fit of both,” Yerli told the lat­est issue of Edge.

“PC is eas­ily a gen­er­a­tion ahead right now. With 360 and PS3, we believe the qual­ity of the games beyond Crysis 2 and other CryEngine devel­op­ments will be pretty much lim­ited to what their cre­ative expres­sions is, what the con­tent is. You won’t be able to squeeze more juice from these rocks.”

There is no doubt that in terms of sheer com­put­ing power present gen­er­a­tion con­soles are noth­ing com­pared to mod­ern PCs. They are, how­ever, less expen­sive, much more uni­form as devel­op­ment plat­forms and have larger user base which mat­ters for investors think­ing about poten­tial rev­enue from games that are being cre­ated with their money. With big bud­get titles the mar­gin of error is lower and, in con­se­quence, the level of risk-averse behav­ior is much higher.

To explain this in more detail I could bore you to death by bring­ing up the con­cept of value net­works and the way they influ­ence man­age­r­ial and invest­ment deci­sions in every com­pany or, more gen­er­ally, in every orga­ni­za­tion. Fortunately it can be summed up by say­ing that, unsurprisingly, busi­nesses go where the money and growth poten­tial are. If con­sole mar­kets seem more attrac­tive to devel­op­ers and pub­lish­ers then con­sole own­ers will be served with more big bud­get titles and chances for devel­op­ment of new, PC-exclusive AAA titles will decrease. This is what Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions men­tions when dis­cussing why his com­pany is not releas­ing PC games anymore:

“We have much of the tech­nol­ogy in place to pro­duce PC ver­sions of all these games, but there is still some more work required to make them ship­pable and that costs money.

“So far, our pub­lish­ers have not elected to fund that work. Not because they hate PC Gamers, but because they don’t see enough finan­cial reward.”

Am I wor­ried by this as a PC gamer? Not so much. Surely, I would love to put my fin­gers on “Brutal Legend” but PC video game mar­ket is full of other exist­ing and upcom­ing titles from major stu­dios and it is by far the most open and diverse one. From incred­i­bly pop­u­lar MMOs like “World of Warcraft” to com­plex 4X titles to lit­tle indie gems for niche mani­acs, there is no bet­ter place for an eclec­tic player to be. Obviously, there are some fran­chises like Halo, Gears of War, Armored Core, Resistance or Killzone that I would love to see on PC but, in gen­eral, every major plat­form offers so many titles and choice so diverse and vast that there is really not much harm for any of them in some games being unavailable.

It is true that try­ing to get the best deal from incom­pat­i­ble plat­forms can be a pain for a video games fan. But thanks to the present diver­sity there are more alter­na­tives to choose from as each plat­form cre­ates a dif­fer­ent ecosys­tem around it, giv­ing its users a unique mix of fran­chises, ser­vices, prices and tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties. And the more choice we have, the bet­ter it is, even if it some­times involves for­go­ing par­tic­u­lar titles or pay­ing more for being able to play them.

So, are PC games held back by con­soles? Technically, maybe, but I sim­ply do not care. There is enough inno­va­tion in the indie scene already and if I want to play a block­buster game, there are many more of these avail­able than I have time for try­ing them all. As a cus­tomer, I can pick only the ones of best qual­ity and still have plenty of games to dive into. If multi-platform devel­op­ment means even more of this stuff show­ing up on PC, I am all for it, even if not every major fran­chise is going to be brought to my beloved platform.