A Black Falcon
Member
Edit: Added a section at the end (mostly copied from a later reply of mine in the thread) on the rise of digital distribution, and significantly edited the last couple of paragraphs of the original post to insert points concerning the rise of casual gaming (puzzle games, Facebook games, etc), integrated graphics chips, laptops/netbooks, and cellphones.
First, this will be long and I don't like bolding things. How would I decide what is more important? I can't. Sorry.
Second, I do not actually believe that PC gaming now is awful, or dead. There are still many good PC games in development, in fact. But when you look at the American and Western European development scenes, it is incontestable that PC gaming does not have the same place that it did ten or fifteen years ago. Note the regions I am focusing on -- that is very important to remember. What I am trying to go through here are possible reasons why it happened, beyond just "it is explained by changing tastes" or something like that.
Last, yes, I miss PC gaming as it was. That should become immediately very obvious. But again, I do think it is still great, and I don't dislike console gaming -- I love lots of console games, and spend just as much time playing console games as I do PC. I like both... which is why I'm so sad to see one of those fading away so much. PC games are not unique once they have merged into console games, and become more like them than like what makes them what they are.
History is very important to me and I have studied it extensively, which is probably why I thought it best to start with an early history of PC gaming, before I got into my attempts at explaining the reasons behind what happened to it in the last decade. Even there though the historical perspective is an important part of it I think. Also, as I say at the end, I don't really consider this "complete", due to all the things I'm sure I'm not thinking of, over-emphasizing, or what have you. That's why the title is "an attempted analysis", not "an analysis".
Electronic gaming was invented in the US. From 1946 to the early 1980s, all of the major advances in electronic gaming happened here. Everyone else was playing catchup. The first PC game was American, from 1962. The first arcade game American, from 1972. The first videogame console American, from 1972. And then the first significantly successful console American, from 1977. But in the late '70s and early '80s, though there were many American companies making videogames, none of them thought of videogames alone as the answer. They all thought that the actual goal was a hybrid computer-console system, or perhaps just a computer alone, and that the consoles were just a transition or a hook to get people into their "real" business, the computers. Computers were serious pieces of equipment with real uses, after all, not just games machines. They were wrong that htat was what people wanted, but they didn't know that. And so, before the crash we saw things like Coleco's Adam computer addon, the Intellivision computer addon, the Atari 5200 being a consolized Atari 400/800 computer essentially, and more. Even the Japanese got into the act -- Sega's first console, the SG-1000, had a computer addon for instance.
Then, in 1983-84, the Western console industry crashed. It would be famously "brought back" by Nintendo in 1985-86, but in fact gaming never went away -- because those computers didn't crash. The IBM PC, Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and more, all had significant market shares and large games markets through the '80s and into the early '90s (Only the PC would get beyond that, in the early '90s all the competitors except for Mac died off). So the standard story, that Nintendo saved gaming, isn't precisely true... computer gaming never crashed and never died off. This is obviously important -- as a result of this Western development was focused on the PC, a fact which continued to be true for a long time afterwards. Of course some Western studios made console games, but they were a decided minority, and in many cases their games were not as good. This was a reality which would only very slowly change.
As I said, there weren't many good NES games from Western developers... but there were LOTS of great PC games during that era. Adventure games (text, graphical, and FMV-based), RPGs, platformers, strategy games, space sims, wargames, military vehicular sims, later on FPSes, and more... there were a huge variety of titles on the PC through the third, fourth, and fifth console generations, and a lot of the games had big budgets for the time, certainly comparable and almost certainly above the budgets of your average probably junky Western-developed console game then.
So, the '80s were really good for PC gaming. In the '90s consoles continued to grow in popularity, but despite that, PC gaming stayed successful through the decade. Now, here's an important point -- PC games did not sell like console games. That is, console games are now and always have been heavily front-loaded -- the majority of sales happen in the first week. PC games just weren't like that. You would release a game with the expectation that it would be on the shelves for years and sell slowly over that period of time, and that is exactly what happened. Back in the early or mid '90s you could go into any Software ETC and see large numbers of games that came out years ago there on the shelves being sold new. People play PC games for longer on average than console games because they often have much more content thanks to things like level editors, online/modem multiplayer, etc., and they do not always buy them right when they came out.
Europe was even more focused on PC games over console games than the US. In the second half of the '80s and the early '90s, most people gaming in Europe did it on computers such as the Atari ST, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. While in Western Europe eventually consoles became quite popular, though PC games are still much more popular in Germany and some other Western European countries than they are in the US, in Eastern Europe most gaming is still done on PC. That is why so many PC games these days come from Eastern Europe. Europe has always been one of the major strongholds of PC gaming.
It was only Japan where consoles always dominated...
But wait, even in Japan there were PCs in the '80s, with a stronger gaming scene than they had in the '90s and beyond. The NEC PC-8801, NEC PC-9801, MSX I and II, FM Towns, and Sharp X68000 all had real markets back in the '80s and into the early '90s. The MSX particularly was very successful in Japan. It's too bad that the PC didn't keep that market going but instead almost everything went to consoles... but yes, for a while computer games did have some success in Japan. It's just that there that mostly died off in the early '90s. Perhaps it has something to do with the kinds of genres popular in the region, or how people play games, or something else, I'm not entirely certain. I'm sure lots of factors are involved. Now of course in Japan it's basically mostly visual novels and dating sims, aside from doujin games and the occasional release from a Falcom or Koei.
Getting back to the US though, by the late '90s computer game developers and publishers were getting bigger, but the market wasn't growing enough to satisfy them, so they started looking more seriously at other markets. Company after company started moving towards consoles, lured by the large number of gamers and the promise of more immediate dollars than they were getting on the PC. I'm not sure how important a factor the sales aspect was, but I think it might have been one. Greed and a desire for greater profits certainly has to be seriously considered as a factor. Once again, after all, companies exist to make money for their shareholders.
As for genre diversity, it held up through the '90s. FPSes became more and more popular, but wargames, military sims, platformers, top-down action games, turnbased and realtime strategy games, graphic adventures, life sims, puzzle games, life/building sims (SimCity, etc), and more were all there to provide a massive amount of variety. Over time adventure games did fade and FPSes and RTSes become more prominent, but the other genres did not entirely disappear until the '00s, as PC gaming became more and more dominated by those few genres and most PC developers stopped being PC exclusive. Puzzle games have survived in the casual sphere of course, as well; sometimes I forget it, but PC puzzle games are probably actually more popular now than they ever have been before. Most other genres, particularly anything requring a budget, have not been so lucky of course.
One of the crucial developments happened in the mid '90s when MMOs arrived on the scene in a big way after Ultima Online was released. The genre had always been around in the MUD form, but UO (and Meridian 59 before it, though that one was much less successful) was a new breed, a graphical, large-scale massively multiplayer online RPG. The game was a massive hit and is still operating today. EverQuest a few years later compounded that and the MMO craze was on. I do think that this had an important role in what happened to PC gaming -- because in terms of raw dollars, PC games never actually decreased in income. It's just that an increasingly large amount of that money, and gaming time, went into MMOs, with their monthly fees and massive timesinks. There was less and less room for other kinds of games to have much of a market.
Still, adventure games, space sims and wargames lasted past the early years of the MMORPG without entirely disappearing... but by 2001, all three were obviously on their last legs. Wargames and adventure games survived as low-budget titles developed by small, often Eastern European developers, but high-end space, flight, and military vehicular sims pretty much entirely disappeared, as without the big budgets that those games required nothing like the great ones of old could be made again. This is the situation today with those genres. Non-MMO RPGs of course did not die off, as games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Dragon Age show, but they did become much less common. These were all side-effects of the shift of focus from PCs to consoles in so many Western video game developers and gamers. If someone believed that the fading of those genres helped cause the shift it could be a cause as well as an effect, but I'm not certain which way that goes.
A related question to the above would be issues of gamers' tastes. On both PCs and consoles of course over time tastes change, but in the past decade tastes for the majority seemed to head in an even more console-centric direction than it had been before. Why was this? I'd think some people would still want to try those kinds of games too. Perhaps they would if they still existed, but don't because they don't and make to with much simpler console games that are sort of "comparable". Or perhaps they just don't know that they might like them because they've never tried, because people assume that no one wants to play those games anymore so few people make them and even less effort is put into marketing the things. I really don't know... I will say, though, something like the recent IL-2 Sturmovik console game with both a sim and an arcade mode is a pretty good idea, for these times. But why did it get to this point to begin with?
Another important factor, also monetarily related, is retail space. Retailers like the console market, with its high turnover and quick sales, better in general. They also disliked the large boxes that most PC games used because of how much space they took up, so in the early '00s Wal-Mart forced smaller boxes on the PC gaming industry. I would mark that as a major step towards the collapse of PC gaming as it had been, for without a larger box you cannot fit a large manual, as many extras like maps and quick-help cards, and sometimes even a real jewelcase in the box. The losses of things such as jewelcases and thick manuals helped push the picture of PC games as losing what they had had and being 'cheap', I think. Is it really a coincidence that this happened at the same time that PC gaming was starting to struggle in ways it had not before? Perhaps it was just an effect, but I think it was probably a partial cause as well.
Meanwhile, at the same time, the 6th generation of consoles (PS2, Xbox, GC, DC) simply simply was far too successful and popular to ignore, I guess. As I said above, the PC developers were lured in, I believe, by both the narrowing PC market (thanks to MMOs and the huge success of specific strategy and FPS games that pushed smaller genres and developers out) and by increasing budgets, that made PC game development much more difficult on the scale it had previously existed on. You needed to sell a lot more units now in order to make money, so that new flight sim would cost more than ever to make without more return. For some cases though as I said earlier I do think greed had a big part of it too, as they saw this big other market and wanted in. And then after some moved over, more and more followed them and it snowballed into the situation we see today where PC games are mostly either console ports, MMOs, or Eastern European.
One interesting case of change over time is Western developers' reactions to the controlled nature of console systems versus the open nature of the PC. I mean, computers are at their best when they are open and accessible. There are also no licensing fees, no company that must certify that you are allowed to release a game on the platform. On consoles there are rules and restrictions. Anyone can make a computer game, but that isn't true on consoles. Back in the '80s these rules turned off Western developers, who went to great lengths to try to avoid paying Nintendo and Sega's licensing fees (look up Atari/Tengen v. Nintendo, Accolade v. Sega, and the EA/Sega deal that got them on the Genesis -- in all three cases the companies used their own technology to create carts that would work on those systems without a license. In EA's case they used that as leverage to get lower licensing fees out of Sega.). American development on consoles increased in the SNES/Genesis period, as restrictions got a bit lighter, and then even more on the PSX and N64, as the fees and restrictions were again reduced, but still, it was a barrier. However, now many companies actually seem to prefer that kind of environment, because the controlled nature allows THEM to be more controlling too, while on the PC they blame piracy for destroying their sales as if their own decisions haven't had an even greater impact (see: Ubisoft). Corporate cultures have obviously changed. Perhaps the dollar signs overwhelmed their caution, or the reductions in fees and such were enough for them, or piracy really was that big of a problem... I'm not sure, though I do think that they overstate the amount of damage done to them by piracy; the evidence is that most people who pirate games would not have paid full price for them.
So many people just don't have good enough computers to run games because of that. You need to already be a gamer before you end up getting a computer good enough to play games -- and that is of course a viscous cycle. Before integrated graphics took off, many more people had machines capable of playing high-end games. Hopefully eventually something will be done about this problem, but for now it's definitely a big one.
Other than Eastern European games and multiplatform titles there are still a few games here and there being released for the PC, particularly in the MMORPG, RTS, and FPS genres, as well as longrunning series like Civilization. The other major bright spot is casual PC gaming, which is now more successful than ever. Facebook games, Popcap games, and more are doing very well. However, that has not led to any rebirth of the hardcore, big-budget PC gaming market that is my focus here, so so far at least it is not a savior of serious PC games. It's good, and worth noting, but not the answer. There is an important factor compounding this: many people who play those casual games are not people who could play hardcore games even if they wanted to. Their computers, if desktops, probably have integrated graphics chips on the motherboards as their only video hardware, and if a laptop or, worse, netbook, have worse capabilities all around as a rule. Nobody with a netbook as their computer could be playing games even if they wanted to. On a laptop or low-end desktop, it's unlikely unless they were already a gamer, and that creates a viscous circle where only people already gamers buy computers good enough to play games on. Needless to say, that is not a good cycle to get into. Hopefully someday there will be a solution to this, and cheaper computers will start actually including graphics chips good enough to play games on, but for how it's a real issue. Oh, and I also should mention cellphones, and that anyone using a phone as their major internet medium probably isn't using their computer as often as they used to, and are playing some simple little games on their phone as well.
We're not at a worst-case-scenario yet, however. I'm a huge Blizzard fan and am looking forward to Starcraft II as much as anyone. But looking at the big picture, across all genres, it is very clear that unless all you care about are RTSes, MMOs, and FPSes, PC gaming is a shadow of what it was.
So, overall, I don't know the complete answer. There were obviously a lot of factors involved in why it happened, though, and I was trying to work through them here. I'm sure I got some and missed others entirely. I'm just trying to think of things that were probably factors. The things I'm talking about were probably all involved, to some degree or another. I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions though, because all this is still very rough and incomplete. I think I'm getting a little closer now, but still, I do not have a complete picture of what happened and why.
Oh yeah, as an aside, of course, now that budget problem has hit them again, and worse. Now even PS360PC development doesn't always make their money back, and game development costs just keep skyrocketing upwards... what do they do now?
Added via edit, from a later post of mine in the thread: Some people mentioned digital distribution (DD) stores such as Steam as the answer. Here's my thoughts on that.
First, If it was still actually possible to find PC games in actual stores, like it used to be, we wouldn't need to rely on online distribution for everything... some people would anyway, of course, but the choice would actually be there. It isn't really now. And also, if Steam is the answer, then why are most of the games on it either multiplatform titles also available on consoles (a little better on PC, but also on consoles, and which system was it designed for first and foremost?), European, or low-budget homebrew-ish games? Steam as a service is just a distribution mechanism. Look at what the actual GAMES on Steam are and you'd see that they prove my point entirely.
I mean, yes, DD has done a good job of providing a place for games like those to be sold now that the retail market for PC games is so dead. But that right there is part of the problem I think, that people have forgotten what it used to be like and think that DD is better than retail ever was...
Well, maybe for those small homebrew-style games DD is better than retail ever was, but for almost anything with a budget, is it really? For anyone who can remember, is Steam really better than, say, a Software ETC. or something in the early to mid '90s? I don't think so, myself. Maybe part of that is that I like owning physical copies of games, and part of it is that I don't like Steam that much, but I definitely don't think so. It's certainly infinitely superior to the terrible PC sections of Gamestops today, of course, but that is in fact a part of the problem.
For, without retail you make it a lot harder for people to become interested in PC games. Unless there is some kind of hook from those now very popular casual games into DD services, how would those people even know where to look? And also, without the pull of spur-of-the-moment sales of boxed games, will as many people try them as otherwise would? Out of sight, out of mind, you know. I know that Steam is growing, and other services (that aren't as annoying as Steam in a lot of ways) like Direct2Drive, Good Old Games, Impulse, etc. are too, but still, I just don't see how you ever get over that hurdle. There's a big market for whom boxed games are just the better way to reach them, I think. The death of buying boxed PC games among the hardcore hurts the industry in some important ways -- those people looking at the PC section of their Gamestop now see a small, pathetic selection of titles, and dismiss PC gaming immediately as a result. How would they ever even know that there's a much better selection than that out there, only they're mostly only available digitally?
The success of Valve's own games definitely pushes Steam and helps with this, but still, it is an issue. Plus, I at least do not see the death of the box as a good thing!
That is not to take away from the accomplishment of making it so much easier for people to access shareware-ish games than it ever has been before. That's fantastic. But for people like me who do like owning boxed games, or for the much larger market I just described, having boxed PC games continue to fade just isn't something that I can see as an improvement -- even if it does come with the continued growth of DD services. That growth helps a lot, without them the situation would be indescribably worse than it is, and do do very good things like give people anywhere access to games which they might not otherwise have, but I just don't think that they're the whole answer. Arguably, their growth is actually helping to cause part of the problem.
Also, nothing I just said here really has any impact whatsoever on my article in general. As I said DD has just sort of replaced a piece of the old '90s retail boxed market with online sales. It has done that at the cost of removing those boxes from the sight of people who might have otherwise got interested in PC gaming and making PC game sections in stores look weak. And it has absolutely not reversed the decade-long trend of North American and Western European developers abandoning PC development in droves. Perhaps it has staunched the pain a bit, if you believe that people buying on Steam would not be buying boxed copies of those games if that was how they were only available, but it has absolutely not reversed the trend, either in total releases or in budgets of those very few exclusive releases left.
Because remember, I'm not just talking about the number of games, but the number of big-budget games. So we have more facebook games now. Yes, that's nice. But when are we getting Falcon 5.0, FreeSpace 3, or Grand Prix Legends 2, to give some examples, at budgets and studios that would get products as amazing as the old ones but with today's technology? Never, right? And that is my point here.
First, this will be long and I don't like bolding things. How would I decide what is more important? I can't. Sorry.
Second, I do not actually believe that PC gaming now is awful, or dead. There are still many good PC games in development, in fact. But when you look at the American and Western European development scenes, it is incontestable that PC gaming does not have the same place that it did ten or fifteen years ago. Note the regions I am focusing on -- that is very important to remember. What I am trying to go through here are possible reasons why it happened, beyond just "it is explained by changing tastes" or something like that.
Last, yes, I miss PC gaming as it was. That should become immediately very obvious. But again, I do think it is still great, and I don't dislike console gaming -- I love lots of console games, and spend just as much time playing console games as I do PC. I like both... which is why I'm so sad to see one of those fading away so much. PC games are not unique once they have merged into console games, and become more like them than like what makes them what they are.
History is very important to me and I have studied it extensively, which is probably why I thought it best to start with an early history of PC gaming, before I got into my attempts at explaining the reasons behind what happened to it in the last decade. Even there though the historical perspective is an important part of it I think. Also, as I say at the end, I don't really consider this "complete", due to all the things I'm sure I'm not thinking of, over-emphasizing, or what have you. That's why the title is "an attempted analysis", not "an analysis".
Electronic gaming was invented in the US. From 1946 to the early 1980s, all of the major advances in electronic gaming happened here. Everyone else was playing catchup. The first PC game was American, from 1962. The first arcade game American, from 1972. The first videogame console American, from 1972. And then the first significantly successful console American, from 1977. But in the late '70s and early '80s, though there were many American companies making videogames, none of them thought of videogames alone as the answer. They all thought that the actual goal was a hybrid computer-console system, or perhaps just a computer alone, and that the consoles were just a transition or a hook to get people into their "real" business, the computers. Computers were serious pieces of equipment with real uses, after all, not just games machines. They were wrong that htat was what people wanted, but they didn't know that. And so, before the crash we saw things like Coleco's Adam computer addon, the Intellivision computer addon, the Atari 5200 being a consolized Atari 400/800 computer essentially, and more. Even the Japanese got into the act -- Sega's first console, the SG-1000, had a computer addon for instance.
Then, in 1983-84, the Western console industry crashed. It would be famously "brought back" by Nintendo in 1985-86, but in fact gaming never went away -- because those computers didn't crash. The IBM PC, Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and more, all had significant market shares and large games markets through the '80s and into the early '90s (Only the PC would get beyond that, in the early '90s all the competitors except for Mac died off). So the standard story, that Nintendo saved gaming, isn't precisely true... computer gaming never crashed and never died off. This is obviously important -- as a result of this Western development was focused on the PC, a fact which continued to be true for a long time afterwards. Of course some Western studios made console games, but they were a decided minority, and in many cases their games were not as good. This was a reality which would only very slowly change.
As I said, there weren't many good NES games from Western developers... but there were LOTS of great PC games during that era. Adventure games (text, graphical, and FMV-based), RPGs, platformers, strategy games, space sims, wargames, military vehicular sims, later on FPSes, and more... there were a huge variety of titles on the PC through the third, fourth, and fifth console generations, and a lot of the games had big budgets for the time, certainly comparable and almost certainly above the budgets of your average probably junky Western-developed console game then.
So, the '80s were really good for PC gaming. In the '90s consoles continued to grow in popularity, but despite that, PC gaming stayed successful through the decade. Now, here's an important point -- PC games did not sell like console games. That is, console games are now and always have been heavily front-loaded -- the majority of sales happen in the first week. PC games just weren't like that. You would release a game with the expectation that it would be on the shelves for years and sell slowly over that period of time, and that is exactly what happened. Back in the early or mid '90s you could go into any Software ETC and see large numbers of games that came out years ago there on the shelves being sold new. People play PC games for longer on average than console games because they often have much more content thanks to things like level editors, online/modem multiplayer, etc., and they do not always buy them right when they came out.
Europe was even more focused on PC games over console games than the US. In the second half of the '80s and the early '90s, most people gaming in Europe did it on computers such as the Atari ST, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. While in Western Europe eventually consoles became quite popular, though PC games are still much more popular in Germany and some other Western European countries than they are in the US, in Eastern Europe most gaming is still done on PC. That is why so many PC games these days come from Eastern Europe. Europe has always been one of the major strongholds of PC gaming.
It was only Japan where consoles always dominated...
But wait, even in Japan there were PCs in the '80s, with a stronger gaming scene than they had in the '90s and beyond. The NEC PC-8801, NEC PC-9801, MSX I and II, FM Towns, and Sharp X68000 all had real markets back in the '80s and into the early '90s. The MSX particularly was very successful in Japan. It's too bad that the PC didn't keep that market going but instead almost everything went to consoles... but yes, for a while computer games did have some success in Japan. It's just that there that mostly died off in the early '90s. Perhaps it has something to do with the kinds of genres popular in the region, or how people play games, or something else, I'm not entirely certain. I'm sure lots of factors are involved. Now of course in Japan it's basically mostly visual novels and dating sims, aside from doujin games and the occasional release from a Falcom or Koei.
Getting back to the US though, by the late '90s computer game developers and publishers were getting bigger, but the market wasn't growing enough to satisfy them, so they started looking more seriously at other markets. Company after company started moving towards consoles, lured by the large number of gamers and the promise of more immediate dollars than they were getting on the PC. I'm not sure how important a factor the sales aspect was, but I think it might have been one. Greed and a desire for greater profits certainly has to be seriously considered as a factor. Once again, after all, companies exist to make money for their shareholders.
As for genre diversity, it held up through the '90s. FPSes became more and more popular, but wargames, military sims, platformers, top-down action games, turnbased and realtime strategy games, graphic adventures, life sims, puzzle games, life/building sims (SimCity, etc), and more were all there to provide a massive amount of variety. Over time adventure games did fade and FPSes and RTSes become more prominent, but the other genres did not entirely disappear until the '00s, as PC gaming became more and more dominated by those few genres and most PC developers stopped being PC exclusive. Puzzle games have survived in the casual sphere of course, as well; sometimes I forget it, but PC puzzle games are probably actually more popular now than they ever have been before. Most other genres, particularly anything requring a budget, have not been so lucky of course.
One of the crucial developments happened in the mid '90s when MMOs arrived on the scene in a big way after Ultima Online was released. The genre had always been around in the MUD form, but UO (and Meridian 59 before it, though that one was much less successful) was a new breed, a graphical, large-scale massively multiplayer online RPG. The game was a massive hit and is still operating today. EverQuest a few years later compounded that and the MMO craze was on. I do think that this had an important role in what happened to PC gaming -- because in terms of raw dollars, PC games never actually decreased in income. It's just that an increasingly large amount of that money, and gaming time, went into MMOs, with their monthly fees and massive timesinks. There was less and less room for other kinds of games to have much of a market.
Still, adventure games, space sims and wargames lasted past the early years of the MMORPG without entirely disappearing... but by 2001, all three were obviously on their last legs. Wargames and adventure games survived as low-budget titles developed by small, often Eastern European developers, but high-end space, flight, and military vehicular sims pretty much entirely disappeared, as without the big budgets that those games required nothing like the great ones of old could be made again. This is the situation today with those genres. Non-MMO RPGs of course did not die off, as games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Dragon Age show, but they did become much less common. These were all side-effects of the shift of focus from PCs to consoles in so many Western video game developers and gamers. If someone believed that the fading of those genres helped cause the shift it could be a cause as well as an effect, but I'm not certain which way that goes.
A related question to the above would be issues of gamers' tastes. On both PCs and consoles of course over time tastes change, but in the past decade tastes for the majority seemed to head in an even more console-centric direction than it had been before. Why was this? I'd think some people would still want to try those kinds of games too. Perhaps they would if they still existed, but don't because they don't and make to with much simpler console games that are sort of "comparable". Or perhaps they just don't know that they might like them because they've never tried, because people assume that no one wants to play those games anymore so few people make them and even less effort is put into marketing the things. I really don't know... I will say, though, something like the recent IL-2 Sturmovik console game with both a sim and an arcade mode is a pretty good idea, for these times. But why did it get to this point to begin with?
Another important factor, also monetarily related, is retail space. Retailers like the console market, with its high turnover and quick sales, better in general. They also disliked the large boxes that most PC games used because of how much space they took up, so in the early '00s Wal-Mart forced smaller boxes on the PC gaming industry. I would mark that as a major step towards the collapse of PC gaming as it had been, for without a larger box you cannot fit a large manual, as many extras like maps and quick-help cards, and sometimes even a real jewelcase in the box. The losses of things such as jewelcases and thick manuals helped push the picture of PC games as losing what they had had and being 'cheap', I think. Is it really a coincidence that this happened at the same time that PC gaming was starting to struggle in ways it had not before? Perhaps it was just an effect, but I think it was probably a partial cause as well.
Meanwhile, at the same time, the 6th generation of consoles (PS2, Xbox, GC, DC) simply simply was far too successful and popular to ignore, I guess. As I said above, the PC developers were lured in, I believe, by both the narrowing PC market (thanks to MMOs and the huge success of specific strategy and FPS games that pushed smaller genres and developers out) and by increasing budgets, that made PC game development much more difficult on the scale it had previously existed on. You needed to sell a lot more units now in order to make money, so that new flight sim would cost more than ever to make without more return. For some cases though as I said earlier I do think greed had a big part of it too, as they saw this big other market and wanted in. And then after some moved over, more and more followed them and it snowballed into the situation we see today where PC games are mostly either console ports, MMOs, or Eastern European.
One interesting case of change over time is Western developers' reactions to the controlled nature of console systems versus the open nature of the PC. I mean, computers are at their best when they are open and accessible. There are also no licensing fees, no company that must certify that you are allowed to release a game on the platform. On consoles there are rules and restrictions. Anyone can make a computer game, but that isn't true on consoles. Back in the '80s these rules turned off Western developers, who went to great lengths to try to avoid paying Nintendo and Sega's licensing fees (look up Atari/Tengen v. Nintendo, Accolade v. Sega, and the EA/Sega deal that got them on the Genesis -- in all three cases the companies used their own technology to create carts that would work on those systems without a license. In EA's case they used that as leverage to get lower licensing fees out of Sega.). American development on consoles increased in the SNES/Genesis period, as restrictions got a bit lighter, and then even more on the PSX and N64, as the fees and restrictions were again reduced, but still, it was a barrier. However, now many companies actually seem to prefer that kind of environment, because the controlled nature allows THEM to be more controlling too, while on the PC they blame piracy for destroying their sales as if their own decisions haven't had an even greater impact (see: Ubisoft). Corporate cultures have obviously changed. Perhaps the dollar signs overwhelmed their caution, or the reductions in fees and such were enough for them, or piracy really was that big of a problem... I'm not sure, though I do think that they overstate the amount of damage done to them by piracy; the evidence is that most people who pirate games would not have paid full price for them.
So many people just don't have good enough computers to run games because of that. You need to already be a gamer before you end up getting a computer good enough to play games -- and that is of course a viscous cycle. Before integrated graphics took off, many more people had machines capable of playing high-end games. Hopefully eventually something will be done about this problem, but for now it's definitely a big one.
Other than Eastern European games and multiplatform titles there are still a few games here and there being released for the PC, particularly in the MMORPG, RTS, and FPS genres, as well as longrunning series like Civilization. The other major bright spot is casual PC gaming, which is now more successful than ever. Facebook games, Popcap games, and more are doing very well. However, that has not led to any rebirth of the hardcore, big-budget PC gaming market that is my focus here, so so far at least it is not a savior of serious PC games. It's good, and worth noting, but not the answer. There is an important factor compounding this: many people who play those casual games are not people who could play hardcore games even if they wanted to. Their computers, if desktops, probably have integrated graphics chips on the motherboards as their only video hardware, and if a laptop or, worse, netbook, have worse capabilities all around as a rule. Nobody with a netbook as their computer could be playing games even if they wanted to. On a laptop or low-end desktop, it's unlikely unless they were already a gamer, and that creates a viscous circle where only people already gamers buy computers good enough to play games on. Needless to say, that is not a good cycle to get into. Hopefully someday there will be a solution to this, and cheaper computers will start actually including graphics chips good enough to play games on, but for how it's a real issue. Oh, and I also should mention cellphones, and that anyone using a phone as their major internet medium probably isn't using their computer as often as they used to, and are playing some simple little games on their phone as well.
We're not at a worst-case-scenario yet, however. I'm a huge Blizzard fan and am looking forward to Starcraft II as much as anyone. But looking at the big picture, across all genres, it is very clear that unless all you care about are RTSes, MMOs, and FPSes, PC gaming is a shadow of what it was.
So, overall, I don't know the complete answer. There were obviously a lot of factors involved in why it happened, though, and I was trying to work through them here. I'm sure I got some and missed others entirely. I'm just trying to think of things that were probably factors. The things I'm talking about were probably all involved, to some degree or another. I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions though, because all this is still very rough and incomplete. I think I'm getting a little closer now, but still, I do not have a complete picture of what happened and why.
Oh yeah, as an aside, of course, now that budget problem has hit them again, and worse. Now even PS360PC development doesn't always make their money back, and game development costs just keep skyrocketing upwards... what do they do now?
Added via edit, from a later post of mine in the thread: Some people mentioned digital distribution (DD) stores such as Steam as the answer. Here's my thoughts on that.
First, If it was still actually possible to find PC games in actual stores, like it used to be, we wouldn't need to rely on online distribution for everything... some people would anyway, of course, but the choice would actually be there. It isn't really now. And also, if Steam is the answer, then why are most of the games on it either multiplatform titles also available on consoles (a little better on PC, but also on consoles, and which system was it designed for first and foremost?), European, or low-budget homebrew-ish games? Steam as a service is just a distribution mechanism. Look at what the actual GAMES on Steam are and you'd see that they prove my point entirely.
I mean, yes, DD has done a good job of providing a place for games like those to be sold now that the retail market for PC games is so dead. But that right there is part of the problem I think, that people have forgotten what it used to be like and think that DD is better than retail ever was...
Well, maybe for those small homebrew-style games DD is better than retail ever was, but for almost anything with a budget, is it really? For anyone who can remember, is Steam really better than, say, a Software ETC. or something in the early to mid '90s? I don't think so, myself. Maybe part of that is that I like owning physical copies of games, and part of it is that I don't like Steam that much, but I definitely don't think so. It's certainly infinitely superior to the terrible PC sections of Gamestops today, of course, but that is in fact a part of the problem.
For, without retail you make it a lot harder for people to become interested in PC games. Unless there is some kind of hook from those now very popular casual games into DD services, how would those people even know where to look? And also, without the pull of spur-of-the-moment sales of boxed games, will as many people try them as otherwise would? Out of sight, out of mind, you know. I know that Steam is growing, and other services (that aren't as annoying as Steam in a lot of ways) like Direct2Drive, Good Old Games, Impulse, etc. are too, but still, I just don't see how you ever get over that hurdle. There's a big market for whom boxed games are just the better way to reach them, I think. The death of buying boxed PC games among the hardcore hurts the industry in some important ways -- those people looking at the PC section of their Gamestop now see a small, pathetic selection of titles, and dismiss PC gaming immediately as a result. How would they ever even know that there's a much better selection than that out there, only they're mostly only available digitally?
The success of Valve's own games definitely pushes Steam and helps with this, but still, it is an issue. Plus, I at least do not see the death of the box as a good thing!
That is not to take away from the accomplishment of making it so much easier for people to access shareware-ish games than it ever has been before. That's fantastic. But for people like me who do like owning boxed games, or for the much larger market I just described, having boxed PC games continue to fade just isn't something that I can see as an improvement -- even if it does come with the continued growth of DD services. That growth helps a lot, without them the situation would be indescribably worse than it is, and do do very good things like give people anywhere access to games which they might not otherwise have, but I just don't think that they're the whole answer. Arguably, their growth is actually helping to cause part of the problem.
Also, nothing I just said here really has any impact whatsoever on my article in general. As I said DD has just sort of replaced a piece of the old '90s retail boxed market with online sales. It has done that at the cost of removing those boxes from the sight of people who might have otherwise got interested in PC gaming and making PC game sections in stores look weak. And it has absolutely not reversed the decade-long trend of North American and Western European developers abandoning PC development in droves. Perhaps it has staunched the pain a bit, if you believe that people buying on Steam would not be buying boxed copies of those games if that was how they were only available, but it has absolutely not reversed the trend, either in total releases or in budgets of those very few exclusive releases left.
Because remember, I'm not just talking about the number of games, but the number of big-budget games. So we have more facebook games now. Yes, that's nice. But when are we getting Falcon 5.0, FreeSpace 3, or Grand Prix Legends 2, to give some examples, at budgets and studios that would get products as amazing as the old ones but with today's technology? Never, right? And that is my point here.
