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"PC is decimating console, just through price" - Romero

P

Poetic.Injustice

Member
Similar to how Romero and other developers altered the games business with quality shareware games, the Doom designer believes that free-to-play is similarly shaking up the industry for good.

"With PC you have free-to-play and Steam games for five bucks. The PC is decimating console, just through price. Free-to-play has killed a hundred AAA studios," he remarked.

"It's a different form of monetization than Doom or Wolfenstein or Quake where that's free-to-play [as shareware]. Our entire first episode was free - give us no money, play the whole thing. If you like it and want to play more, then you finally pay us. To me that felt like the ultimate fair [model]. I'm not nickel-and-diming you. I didn't cripple the game in any design way. That was a really fair way to market a game," Romero continued. "When we put these games out on shareware, that changed the whole industry. Before shareware there were no CD-ROMs, there were no demos at all. If you wanted to buy Ultima, Secret of Monkey Island, any of those games, you had to look really hard at that box and decide to spend 50 bucks to get it."

For the free-to-play crowd, Romero believes that the popularity of games that have done it right (like World of Tanks) will ultimately raise the bar for the model, and consumers will easily spot developers who make free-to-play titles the dirty way.

"Everybody is getting better at free-to-play design, the freemium design, and it's going to lose its stigma at some point. People will settle into [the mindset] that there is a really fair way of doing it, and the other way is the dirty way. Hopefully that other way is easily noticeable by people and the quality design of freemium rises and becomes a standard. That's what everybody is working hard on. People are spending a lot of time trying to design this the right way. They want people to want to give them money, not have to. If you have to give money, you're doing it wrong... For game designers, that's the holy grail," Romero said.

Romero sees the games platform landscape now being dominated by PC and mobile. Consoles, he said, are not only being hurt by the free-to-play trend, but also by their inherently closed nature.

"The problem with console is that it takes a long time for a full cycle. With PCs, it's a continually evolving platform, and one that supports backward compatibility, and you can use a controller if you want; if I want to play a game that's [made] in DOS from the '80s I can, it's not a problem. You can't do that on a console. Consoles aren't good at playing everything. With PCs if you want a faster system you can just plug in some new video cards, put faster memory in it, and you'll always have the best machine that blows away PS4 or Xbox One," Romero commented.
Click to expand...

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-07-24-pc-is-decimating-console-just-through-price-romero
 
C

Cygnus

Banned
360x200
 
T

Trigonometrize.

Member
The more developers start to "get" F2P design, the more it's going to proliferate. However, at a certain threshold, it's going to implode. Games that are anything less than amazing will struggle to make anything.

Free-to-play has killed a hundred AAA studios
Click to expand...

Seems like faulty causality to me. Studios closed in droves before F2P was ever even a thought.
 
N

neshcom

Banned
I thought this was going to be about the price of hardware, where PC is absolutely not winning.

Still, F2P could evolve to be generally accepted, but major publishers will never do it. The best thing a dev could do is create a pay ceiling and, once you hit that, you can get an unlimited number of consumables/energy. Otherwise, people will see the financial disincentive to keep feeding the beast and the format will destroy itself.
 
L

Last Hearth

Member
He's right about the backward compatibility thing, especially with all the HD remasters that are being released which has convinced me the reason there is no backward compatibility in the new consoles was intentional. They didn't want people to be able to play the old games because they wanted to resell those games again. This kind of anti-consumer action will only come back to haunt them later.
 
C

chuckddd

Fear of a GAF Planet
neshcom said:
Still, F2P could evolve to be generally accepted, but major publishers will never do it. The best thing a dev could do is create a pay ceiling and, once you hit that, you can get an unlimited number of consumables/energy. Otherwise, people will see the financial disincentive to keep feeding the beast and the format will destroy itself.
Click to expand...

EA and Valve are not major publishers?
 
SerTapTap

SerTapTap

Member
Don't believe his points about F2P at all. It's been years since F2P started making bank, especially with how iterative mobile dev is. A couple years of mobile is like a generation of console as far as business plan and marketing is concerned. It's evolved a lot and it's mostly been for the worse regarding monetization design and small devs. It is the reddest ocean.

Trigonometrize. said:
The more developers start to "get" F2P design, the more it's going to proliferate. However, at a certain threshold, it's going to implode. Games that are anything less than amazing will struggle to make anything.



Seems like faulty causality to me. Studios closed in droves before F2P was ever even a thought.
Click to expand...

Yeah gen 7 style AAA killed AAA.
 
D

Dr.Acula

Banned
Is he arguing to his publisher why multiplat is a losing proposition, or is he just console-warring for the sake of it?
 
C

Corine

Member
Can't really argue with anything he's saying. Now back to playing the true Diablo 2 sequel aka Path of Exile.
 
Dr. Kitty Muffins

Dr. Kitty Muffins

Member
neshcom said:
I thought this was going to be about the price of hardware, where PC is absolutely not winning.

Still, F2P could evolve to be generally accepted, but major publishers will never do it. The best thing a dev could do is create a pay ceiling and, once you hit that, you can get an unlimited number of consumables/energy. Otherwise, people will see the financial disincentive to keep feeding the beast and the format will destroy itself.
Click to expand...

Europe absolutely hates the F2P moniker. You can't name it that legally if there are in app purchases.
 
synce

synce

Member
With stuff like Mantle and the rise of HTPC's I wouldn't be surprised if consoles were obsolete after another generation or two.
 
O

Orayn

Member
Lactose_Intolerant said:
I hate how the devs always talk about LoL and WoT as f2p done right.
Click to expand...

While they're not ideal, they're miles better than what most mobile games or F2P games of years past. They get fairly substantial content updates on a regular basis, and the grind isn't so steep that people are discouraged by it.
 
LiquidMetal14

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
What he says is like saying the sky is blue. Consoles are still viable and very much a good thing for mass market people who don't want to deal with PC's. There will be a place for some kind of set top box for a long time. PC will always be PC.
 
P

pushBAK

Member
I disagree.

The fact you can do more with a PC isn't the point. Most consumers (none of which would read this forum), don't know or don't care you could do more with a PC. The cost of entry and learning curve behind a PC is really the limiting factor here (albeit shrinking, but still present).

For example, why would anybody want to buy a Blu-ray player when they could just use a PC? You can do so much more with a PC than a Blu-ray player afterall.. It's because the majority of consumers don't want to deal with the bullshit that goes along with a PC just for watching movies, they just want to watch the movie. The same argument can be applied to games.

Flame On
 
K

Kai Dracon

Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
Last Hearth said:
He's right about the backward compatibility thing, especially with all the HD remasters that are being released which has convinced me the reason there is no backward compatibility in the new consoles was intentional. They didn't want people to be able to play the old games because they wanted to resell those games again. This kind of anti-consumer action will only come back to haunt them later.
Click to expand...

In the case of the consoles, I wouldn't assume complete conspiracy because the need to get away from stuff like Cell was very real. And bolting an Xbox 360 or a PS3 into the new systems would have increased prices even further - after Sony demonstrated $599 consoles don't fly last gen.

However, even if this situation was not contrived purely to sell remasters of games, it's still anti-consumer, and is a relic of old attitudes about game consoles. Console manufacturers have had the luxury of not being required to architecture continuity until now. Because video game consoles began as expensive toys sold to an audience that didn't have much economic sense (being kids). They just wanted new graphics when the old console was played out.

This situation has persisted past its expiration date IMO, propped up a certain percentage of customers who still don't mind discarding their investment to date as long as they get more impressive hardware in a new generation of games. Now the rest of the world has caught on to games but has different standards. Mobile customers expect to buy a new device in an ecosystem and bring their digital identity with them. PC has been revitalized and is easier than ever to use for gaming, so its advantages stand out more clearly.
 
Q

QKT100

Banned
'Decimating'

He says, as Minecraft console sales overtake that of PC, without even having released on Nintendo Wii.

'Decimating'

lol
 
Q

Qassim

Member
pushBAK said:
I disagree.

The fact you can do more with a PC isn't the point. Most consumers (none of which would read this forum), don't know or don't care you could do more with a PC. The cost of entry and learning curve behind a PC is really the limiting factor here (albeit shrinking, but still present).
Click to expand...

But the cost of entry to these F2P games is basically zero for many people - who already have a laptop or desktop capable of playing these games. LoL and DOTA2 are massive in part due to their ability to run on anything - most people in the target market for these games have machines that are capable of it - these can be laptops that cost about the same as a new next-gen console - can play these games and do everything else they need a laptop for (work, regular web browsing, email, school, uni, etc).

People make this mistake all the time, they assume that PC gaming is only done on enthusiast hardware, when no, it isn't. The biggest games on PC can be played on a toaster, and that's a good part of why they're the biggest games - anyone can play them.
 
D

DevilFox

Member
Last Hearth said:
He's right about the backward compatibility thing, especially with all the HD remasters that are being released which has convinced me the reason there is no backward compatibility in the new consoles was intentional. They didn't want people to be able to play the old games because they wanted to resell those games again. This kind of anti-consumer action will only come back to haunt them later.
Click to expand...

No, it doesn't work like that. PCs and consoles belong to 2 different worlds (so far), just accept it rather than looking for evils that don't exist.
Not to mention, the bold line is a stupid and nonsense cliché.
 
M

Momentary

Banned
I was going to say I don't play F2P games the I realized I play dota 2. As for PC games costing 5 bucks, he's damn right about that. I did the average of all the titles of games I've gotten in Steam and Bundles and it comes out to around 5.80 USD a game.

Plus it's really nice when new games already have 20-30 percent on day one of release.
 
Q

QKT100

Banned
Oh god and he's a Doom designer as well, no doubt still bitter that Halo saved the FPS genre from the mess he created.

All consoles count as one platform, when compared against PC.
Click to expand...

Consider

1| PC version's humongous head start
2| Console representation was only one platform until very recently
3| Lifetime sales could well have PC as lowest selling version
 
Q

Qassim

Member
QKT100 said:
'Decimating'

He says, as Minecraft console sales overtake that of PC, without even having released on Nintendo Wii.

'Decimating'

lol
Click to expand...

He's talking about these mega F2P games. You're sort of missing his point quoting Minecraft at us.

A game like League of Legends has more concurrent online players than there are Xbox One owners, it probably has more concurrent online players than all PS4 games combined.

It handily beat the biggest player counts on the 360 at its peak.
 
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