Why PC?
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It's often perceived as a necessity on the console side to make a particular game as appealing as possible to every person who owns a console. The problem is that game publishers have let that thinking creep over into the PC market so now the development and marketing is driven by a need to make a single game that suits everyone. We see it all the time in the dreaded promise of all press releases that a game "will appeal to casual and hardcore players alike." (And if it's a licensed game, this is usually followed by the equally obnoxious claim that it will please both "fans and newcomers.") It's time to stop making such ridiculous claims, and more than that, to stop letting them be the sole consideration that determines how games are made and which ones get published, particularly on the PC.Thanks, Blue's News.
I'm not saying that PC games have to aim for obscurity. Games like The Sims and World of Warcraft have proven that PC can enjoy as much mass-market appeal as any title on the consoles. But neither game earned its success through the traditional release model. Both rode waves of tremendous post-release support, found ways to generate cash far beyond the initial retail purchase, and leveraged the unique strengths of the PC in a way that simply wouldn't have been possible in a console format.
Is it naive to hope for a return to the days of the 1990s when a developer could sell 80,000 copies of a game and still consider itself successful enough to stay in business long enough to make another game? Obviously part of the problem is the skyrocketing development budgets, but as games like Plants vs. Zombies or AudioSurf proved, concept and design are still the main drivers of popularity. The digital publishing revolution is making things a bit easier, but we still need to tackle the harmful expectations that anything less than a blockbuster is an outright failure. It's a sad result of the mass-market mentality that Gears of War can be looked on with pity because it's only the tenth most popular game on Xbox Live. If I made the tenth most popular game on Xbox Live, I'd get a tattoo.
