Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Lately, there has been a lot of banter about how PC Gaming is dead, dying, in decline or unheard of in some rare cases. Normally I tend to ignore these arguments as I have for the last ten years or so, because no matter how many times it is said, it never happens. PC gaming continues on constantly morphing to the market demands. But recently, I was listening to one of the 1up Yours podcast and I heard Garnett Lee just spouting off about PC gaming is dead, put a fork in it, and that it is no longer a viable platform for first person shooters. So, I felt the need to respond in kind to explain to Garnett and the rest of those that feel that the PC is a dead gaming platform.

Those that stoke the fire for PC gaming’s death this year are using the sales numbers of Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis to prove their point. In the first three weeks of sales, Crysis sold 89,000 copies, which all the naysayers jumped on screaming how bad the numbers were, forgetting that the game scared off a lot of people due to its steep system requirements. Unreal Tournament 3 did sell worse than expected on the PC, but when you look at the PS3 numbers, it did not fare all that well on that platform either. It also for some reason only known to Epic, had no advertising push until it was in the store for several weeks.

When you look at the overall sales of video games, the PC market took 14% of the annual sales, at roughly under one billion dollars. It is less than the consoles, but nothing to slouch at. Some of the highlights include World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, which had 1.2 million copies sold, and never forget their $15 monthly fee that made Blizzard such a tempting merger target for Activision. The Sims also added more huge numbers to their base crowd, increasing their lead as the biggest selling gaming franchise ever. But bigger still is the non-inclusion of digital downloads that have become a huge market for companies like Valve, Stardock and others. Steam has now signed up most developers to their service and judging from the three to one server ratio for Team Fortress 2 games, the sales for it and its Orange Box companions did fine on Steam. EA also has their download service which saw a fair amount of activity for Crysis.

PC gaming has declined in the US due to what I feel is a more “instant gratification” of the console, vs. some effort to get a PC game tweaked and balanced to run on your system efficiently. But we forget that gaming is a global market and when you look at Europe, you will see that PC gaming is a huge market with PC games routinely outselling their console counterparts. Crysis has sold very well in Germany and other parts of Europe (Crytek is located in Germany). The same scenario played out with Bioshock on the PC, generating big sales on the PC side of the fence.

This covers a lot of the sales issues. I can agree that PC gaming is not what it was 10 years ago, but it is not as dead as people believe. History has shown in the past, when consoles get later in their lifecycle, PC gaming hits a renaissance. It has happened with every console since the PS1 and will probably continue with this generation of consoles as well.

Turning to the other item that caught me by surprise was the statement that if you wanted to play FPS games, you will want to do it on a console, because they were dead on the PC. This is flat out wrong. Tell that to all the Half Life, Call of Duty, Portal and Team Fortress 2 players that are playing to this day. I know that this statement was made shortly after announcing the numbers for Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3, but that does not mean that the consoles are where FPS games will now live, or that they are dead on the PC. Valve still uses the PC as its lead platform for development. Ask all those PS3 players if The Orange Box plays like a smooth FPS experience on their consoles. I think that both can support the FPS genre quite nicely. Again, Call of Duty 4 may have sold 1.5 million units on the 360, but it sold just under 400,000 units, which is a great number when you consider how many pirated versions of the game were being downloaded the day it came out.

That takes us to one of the biggest reasons we have seen a shift to either the 360/PC dual release or even a digital download strategy and that is piracy. While piracy affects the console industry as well, it is nowhere near the levels that it is on the PC side. It is upsetting when Crysis and Call of Duty 4 have more copies in the process of being downloaded then sells on the first day in the store. Combine that with hacked servers and private servers that have allowed people to use pirated games online for multiplayer and you have a devastating blow to the PC industry. Sadly, it is PC gamers that are killing off their own hobby as more developers can’t bear to see thousands of copies moving through Bit Torrent.

Not everything is a bed of roses however, and I would be amiss if I did not see that things have changed in the PC gaming world. It is no longer the lead platform for gaming like it was 10-15 years ago. And the steep entry requirements are a barrier for a lot of younger gamers. In 1985, I owned a Tandy 1000 that allowed me to play tons of games all the way to 1990, with only one memory upgrade to 640K. With the invention of 3D graphics and super-processors, the price for PC gaming has escalated dramatically, starting in 1995 with the Voodoo and S3 3D video cards. Hardware companies love this, because their margins are made off of these boutique video cards and gaming systems. But it takes away the up and coming crowd that might of gotten into gaming many years ago. Now, they just go to consoles, because they are so much cheaper and don’t take a lot to set up.

I would hope that people realize that while it is not the platform it was years ago, the PC is still here when it comes to gaming and is still a strong platform. Hardware vendors will keep the torch flying, so they don’t lose the big ticket dollars, and when it comes down to it, when you see Crysis on high with all details on and 40fps, you realize that PC gaming still has a few tricks up its sleeve for gamers craving a high end experience.