 | PC, Flash, and bits on a discFebruary 27th, 2008 |
At the Luminaries Lunch, I made the comment that PC gaming at retail is in dire straits. This is not a particularly controversial comment in the industry — everybody at the table agreed, though Chris Taylor went further, saying “PC gaming as we know it is dead.” Sales for PC titles at retail are not very good, and have been trending downwards for a long time. The saving grace is WoW, and other MMORPGs — but even WoW is moving towards forms of digital distribution. I also made the comment that Flash seemed to me to be the next console.
Of course, this led to a massive pile of commentary and articles on the web, including many many negative comments in the discussion threads, which I will attempt to answer here:
Common Sense Gamer argued that
I’m going to have to agree that physical media for PC gaming is going the way of the dinosaur, however; I can’t see physical media going anywhere anytime soon…especially with high definition media such as Blue Ray staring us in the face. What happens with that market in PC gaming? How do you deliver high-def PC gaming to the user? With the emergence of high-def, the PC game industry is going to want to get into that and without a larger internet pipe to deliver that content, they’re going to need physical media that can support it.
Blu-Ray has a lifespan of only a few years. We just aren’t very far away from everything that you would want delivered on that disc to be streamed to you instead. I am probably not even going to bother buying any Blu-Ray discs; I watch most of my movies streamed these days, and if it weren’t too much hassle, I’d rip all my DVDs to hard drive.
Does it mean perhaps a step back in quality? Yeah, maybe. But I, like many consumers, bought my TV a few years ago, when 1080p was not common and commanded a high price premium. I buy a new TV every five to ten years. By the time I get a new one, will I still be buying discs? I don’t honestly think so. My disc usage has already fallen by 3/4 from what it was two years ago.
Are games far behind? Well, consoles are already moving towards more digital distribution with smaller games (smaller meaning “entire games from last gen,” in fact). You could set up streaming games onto modern consoles with hard drives, no question.
Might there be a temporary backwards step in visuals? Yeah, maybe. So?
Many reacted to Chris’ comment as well, saying things like
While i admit that digital distribution is probably going to increase a great deal in the next few years, that doesn’t mean that “PC Gaming as we know it is dead”. Retail will still be the main source of revenue for many publishers.
I think the “as we know it” part specifically references the heyday of the PC, where the biggest and coolest games were on the Windows platform — stuff like what Peter Molyneux and Chris Taylor used to make: the Black and Whites and Total Annihilations. Bluntly, retail revenue for big budget PC games sucks. Sales are just low, low, low for the vast majority of titles. This is why the big budget extravaganzas are on console these days.
Just as clearly, PC gaming as a whole is far from dead, and may well be the most thriving sector in a lot of metrics. Just not necessarily from a commercial perspective. Many folks in comments cited things like STALKER and The Witcher doing quite well at retail, as well as a few other shooter games. But it’s notable that the lion’s share of sales for both these titles happened in Eastern Europe for a markedly lower price than here (950,000 of the 1.65m claimed for STALKER were in Russia and the other CIS countries, for example, and Witcher has a similar story), and that most of the games cited cluster around high-end graphics shooter games with online play. It’s not a broad-based market. Heck, the list includes The Orange Box, which was digitally distributed via Steam.
Of course, the question of whether Flash specifically is the new platform is a valid one, given the current lack of business models, a point Neil Young made during the luncheon as well. As one commenter puts it,
Yes flash is pretty much at saturation point but, you can’t charge someone to download a flash game. This is why games that are free like N the ninja, every extend etc. etc. are moving to consoles. The economy isn’t there on the PC because no-one will pay you for even the best of flash based games.
I played N+ on XBLA last night for an hour and a half. 
As we can see from stuff like The Sims Online turning into EALand, “free” can lead to other business models. The fact that right now people mostly do not monetize Flash games does not mean that Flash games cannot be monetized. And after all, Flash is just a technology, not a game style. It’s basically a rendering engine. N+ does not look significantly different in HD, and it’s worth 800 points on a TV, but not on a PC? That’s a business model issue, not an issue with Flash. Perhaps levels could be sold, extra lives, who knows. There’s plenty of opportunity to experiment, and plenty of other browser-embedded experiences have managed to monetize very nicely.
The commonest complaint I hear is that “the games are too simple.” Usually this is expressed with curse words and derision. But again, game simplicity is not a function of the rendering engine. Especially not in an online scenario where the complexity lives on the server. Someday you will run something like Crysis in a browser. Heck, we’re already up to Quake III, right?
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Flash is the next console,” he posited. “It’s pointing its way to the future more than the next generation of consoles,” with capabilities increasing dramatically over the next 12 months. [...] Raph’s Website
C, Flash, and bits on a disc
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