Last entry, I went into how console gaming has changed in the last two generations. Now, I’m going to go into PC gaming, and how that has changed over a similar time frame.
PCs have come a long way in the past few years. Broken the Gigahertz barrier, made Dual/Quad Core processors, and yet we still use them for the same things. Internet, Work, and Gaming. However, since the leaps in technology, we find ourselves in a somewhat unique situation, that gamers on consoles do not have to worry about.
The situation, quite simply, is that there is a two-tier system for PC games, and which tier you are on depends on how powerful your computer is. On one end, we have the ‘System suckers’, where the games are meant to be run on absolute behemoth machines, overclocked and with water cooling. Examples of this are Crysis and Supreme Commander. Hell, Supreme Commander 2 is waiting for better computers to run on. This tier gets the best of the games, and probably will always do so, simply because the people who play them continuously upgrade their computers, draining their wallets while doing so.
On the other tier, we have the budget gamers. These are people with good to modest PC specifications, that have considered gaming as something they definitely wanted to do, but didn’t want to spend large amounts of money on keeping their computer on the cusp of technological innovation. I myself am on the higher end of this tier, with my 2.3Ghz AMD64 Athlon X2. With a few, notable exceptions (Dawn of War: Soulstorm being the most recent, having somehow managed to stay in the charts for two weeks after it’s release), the rest are either budget re-releases, or just small-studio games that have as little substance as they do graphical style. Don’t get me wrong though, there are good games around that these types of users can enjoy. They’re just not around on Disc. They’re on the internet, as Flash games, the flash version of Portal being an excellent example of simple graphics and creative ideas.
What PC game developers need to realise, is that there is a massive market for the average user. Referring back to Dawn of War, that has the more modest specification of many games, but still outsold it. Not because of a brilliant ad campaign, but because everyone could play it who had a half-decent computer. Hell, develop a low-spec version of a game as well as a high-spec, and see which one wins out. Because even though the high-spec would sell more to begin with, you can pretty much bet the farm that the low-spec would sell on a more lengthy timescale.
Tags: pcgaming, crysis, supreme commander, portal: the flash version, dawn of war
