Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

Just in time for Vista’s ‘gaming push’, the continuing news items about former exclusive PC games being co-opted and delayed to accomodate cross-platform realeses pretty much signals the end of PC gaming, well, PC exclusive gaming, as we know it. It’s going to take something very different to keep hardcore PC gaming alive as a platform in its own right. Most FPS games are now available on consoles. Indeed, a number of big name PC games have been delayed to allow for cross platform launches. It’s only Casual Games and MMOs like World of Warcraft that remain PC exclusive, and the Xbox Live Arcade takes care of the former, whilst developers are surely working hard to correct the latter, too.

The final nail in the coffin, though, is the news that Unreal Tournament mods are being ported to consoles. This is bad news because mods are one of the key community driven assets for big budget FPS games, since they drive sales and massively extend the lifetime of these games. The biggest name mod was Counter Strike, a fan-made mod that extend the life of the retail game Half Life by years. Plenty of people bought copies of Half Life purely to download the free Counter Strike mod, also played exclusively online for free.

Compare this to what will happen with console mods. Whilst consoles were without a hard drive, mods and community created downloadable extensions were an impossiblity. Now that most next gen consoles support hard drives, mods can be installed. Key to this is the official channels for downloadable content, the Xbox Live Arcade system. Games like Unreal Tournament can now offer fan made mods for download via official channels, and in doing so can generate revenue. I’m willing to bet that most home developers, faced with the chance to put their mod on a console *and* earn some money from it too, would agree to whatever terms were offered to them. Given that mod development is often a excellent way to make your name as a budding game developer, and can lead to work offers from big companies like Valve, it that this move by Epic will effectively formalise that process too.

It seems worryingly clear, at this stage, that PC gaming is losing out in comparison to console games, in terms of advertising, revenue, downloadable content, episodic content, virtual item purchases, community features and game exclusives. I think I’m going to take the hint and complete my Wii-60 combo.