Irish Al says:

The PC rises and the PC falls over time with regard to the non-hardcore gamer, but the huge base load of people who like flight sims, FPS, RTS, MMORPG and all the other stuff that requires a mouse and keyboard to play properly remains.

February 14th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

arqueturus says:

That’s called spitting the dummy.

February 14th, 2008 at 12:08 pm

Meat Circus says:

Company shit at making PC games to stop making PC games shocker?

February 14th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

Ging says:

It’s basically just good business sense – id are doing the same thing.

No matter how long you hold out for, eventually you have to go where the big money is, for games, right now, that’s in the console market. Even Valve are shifting that way – I wouldn’t be too surprised to see all their future titles hitting consoles at around the same time as the PC release.

February 14th, 2008 at 12:32 pm

Chis says:

When did RPS mods go soft on us then? What tosh.

(And Cliffy B is obviously more interested in moolah these days, so Epic can go hang as well.)

February 14th, 2008 at 12:34 pm

Muzman says:

I wonder how Bioshock did on the PC and if 2k feel similarly. It’s probably not representative but the sense I have is that for Gears the Xbox crowd thought ‘Cool!!!11′ but PC gamers sort of said ‘Eh, seen it. Looks nice, you can duck and shoot but whatever’.
Bioshock; same sort of thing. Xbox “OMG Revelation!”, PC “eh, same shit, weaker, watery-er even, different bucket”.
The inclination to take your wares to the newer audience that’s easier to impress (no slight meant) makes some sense, even aside from monetary reasons. They just want to be loved, bless.

February 14th, 2008 at 12:38 pm

Taxman says:

I fail to see how this is a surprise to anyone all the former well known PC devs are console focused these days, Bioware, iD, Infinity Ward, Lionhead, Irrational, Monolith etc.

iD are looking to get back into the middle ware licensing arena in a big way which is why the hired/lured away one of Naughty Dog’s star engineers to handle the PS3 version of their new software.

I think Epic have just finally come to the realization that the games they like to make are far more popular on the consoles than on the PC & I’d wager it’s just a matter of time before Epic simply quits making PC games at all. There was also a bit of the PC gaming master race snobbery going on as Epic is more focused on marketing their games on the consoles & PC gamers didn’t like that, Gears was a game with a silly story but it was great fun to play & the PC version was definitely the better version.

Valve are PC gaming fanboys darling and obviously as a business they have a vested interest in the platform with steam. It will be interesting to see if the next titles from Valve will still be the poor ports that the Orange Box was on the consoles. It works both ways and a lot of console gamers turned their nose at Valve’s product because of the poor performance of it.

February 14th, 2008 at 12:49 pm

C0nt1nu1ty says:

bah humbug, pc gaming will always be there and will always be bigger/stronger/faster than consoles

and we have mods! mods are good, consoles cant make crysis into a mech game or quake into a chess based hoverboard hopscotch sim!

Long live PC gaming

February 14th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

SwiftRanger says:

CliffyB, shut up and get us that Jazz Jackrabbit 3, mate. Or a UTIII bonus pack for free. :)

February 14th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

Ging says:

C0nt1nu1ty: Except UT3 on the PS3 can do mods… They want to do them on the 360 too… Admittedly, it’s not perfect on the PS3 yet (something about Sony’s proprietary audio codecs not being available for use to modders), but it’s a huge step forward.

With hard drives on consoles and greater support behind user created content, the time of mods being a PC only thing are, I suspect, coming to an end.

February 14th, 2008 at 1:19 pm

Ed says:

Well, if Gears was on Steam, I’d get it. Until it is, I won’t. I really only buy games on Steam now.

February 14th, 2008 at 1:27 pm

Monkfish says:

Epic are really getting my goat these days. If it isn’t Mark Rein opening his cakehole to spew some form of hyberbolic nonsense, we now have Mr. Bleszinski joining the party to shoot his mouth off, informing us that the PC gaming scene is in “disarray” when last year’s PC release list clearly shows otherwise.

Perhaps he should spend a bit of time in the company of Gabe Newell. That may help him realise that there’s gold in them thar PC gaming hills – it’s just that it’ll take a little effort to get at it.

CliffyB obviously doesn’t like effort right now, preferring to go for the “easy money”. I imagine the formulaic sequelitis that the Gears franchise is about to enjoy will demonstrate that.

February 14th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

ran93r says:

I tend to take whatever Cliff says with huge servings of tasty salt, he was after all the one saying, not too long ago, that Bombing Run was going to be the next big evolution in e-sports.

Uh-huh, that’s right Cliff.

February 14th, 2008 at 2:09 pm

Butler` says:

He’s basically referring to the ‘Web 2.0′ (*cringe*), social and online direction gaming is going in, spearheaded by the PC.

February 14th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

Ging says:

I suspect he’s actually referring to the flash game portals like Newgrounds and Kongregate, rather than Offroad Raptor Safari or much else.

Butler – I talked about money because that’s what he’s talking about; his full quote, beyond just the disarray part is to a degree, true.

The fact that games other than WoW, the Sims, casual (Popcap) games and Valves output don’t get much of a look in does indicate that there’s some instability (perhaps even disarray) in the PC world.

Take a look at the RPS advent calendar, 24 games, 9 are multi-platform, 6 are pure PC (2 RTS and 2 MMO) and “AAA” – the rest are either mods or “casual” games, the chances of those being played by more than a (relative) handful of people are minimal compared to the ~10 million subscribers playing WoW.

February 14th, 2008 at 2:39 pm

Rook says:

So how much of this is bad blood over poor sales of Unreal Tournament III? I mean what do they expect when it takes them 3 years to add normal maps to UT2k4, and somehow still manage to forget to bring over all the things that made it a great game in the first place?

Single player campaign? Utter shit. Bot AI? Utter shit. Interface? Well admittedly it only went from Terrible to Utter shit so it’s not really a drop in standards. The engine is very scalable, but that’s more of a fact that you can turn the normal maps off and have it look like 2k4 rather than amazing tech.

I find it kinda funny that last time I went online there were more playing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Multiplayer than Deathmatch UTIII.

February 14th, 2008 at 3:20 pm

Ging says:

I struggle to believe that CS1.6 has more active players than WoW – but I can’t find the stats for it on steampowered.com, the list of valve games has vanished from their stats lists (which is itself a bit odd). But I can see that steam, as a service, peaks at around 1.3 million people online at once – I suspect (though have no figures to back it up) that WoW peaks at about the same point (perhaps slightly less – but not all of those people on steam will be playing games, let alone CS1.6).

As for pro gaming, ergh – if only it didn’t give birth to things like tournament.com or Kwari, it might be slightly more bearable.

February 14th, 2008 at 3:44 pm

Chaz says:

Well I can kind of see both sides of the fence here because as some one who has been a PC gamer for nearly 20 years, I have to admit that last year I myself have finally succumbed and bought a 360 for my main games machine. And it’s not just me either I would say that in the “clan” I’ve been a member of for the last 8 or more years, about three quarters of us have slowly but steadily emigrated to the 360 as our main gaming platform since the console’s release. I use the term “clan” loosely BTW as we’re really just a bunch of gamers that meet on a forum to bicker and bitch at each other as well as play the odd online game. So declining PC games sales and a shift to consoles by some of the main developers doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me.

I think the PC would do well to look to Eastern Europe for its successes now, as both Stalker and The Witcher are both excellent games and are easily good enough to drag me away from anything my 360 has to offer. In fact I’m rushing to kill off Mass Effect now just so that I can get some more time in with The Witcher. But for online gaming I have to admit that the ease of using XBL coupled with being able to slum it on my sofa whilst getting my online thrills, has kicked my PC into the shade for the time being.

February 14th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

Muzman says:

Actually, as someone said, the ‘disarray’ part is the interesting bit. He’s been in the biz for quite a while. Was there ever a time when PC gaming wasn’t fairly chaotic, with people stumbling over upgrades and OSs and graphics accelerators and APIs?
His ‘taking of the easy option’ isn’t only for money. CliffyB is getting old and looking to move to a nice, quiet, stable platform in the country after too many years in the rat race.

February 14th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

Rich Powers says:

I lost all respect for Epic after Unreal Tourney III.

Anyone else think that Epic is offended! Insulted! Aghast! over UTIII’s sales? Like PC gamers were supposed to ignore the game’s crappiness and buy it solely because it has “Unreal” and “Tournament” in the title.

But when the PC market saw past this, Epic didn’t know what to do. Instead of improving the game or making a product PC gamers want, they throw their hands up and blame some intangible shit like “disarray.”

If the console market provides easy money, I can’t blame studios eagerly diving in. If anything, this will provide new opportunities for niche-market studios. Besides, the so-called classic PC studios like id and Epic haven’t made a game I’ve really enjoyed in years.

February 14th, 2008 at 5:32 pm

Hitchhiker says:

Epic’s attitude toward PC gaming really shows with GoW PC. It’s a mess of technical issues: crashes, lost saves, no real surround sound and more.
The official forums are filled with frustrated customers, but to no avail.

February 14th, 2008 at 6:00 pm

terry says:

Bad porting, crap sales
then Cliffery B defends
the Unreal Engine.

February 14th, 2008 at 6:36 pm

Matt says:

I agree with most of the comments above.

In the case of Gears of War it came out after having been on console. In the consumer society we live in a large number of people have a PC and gaming consoles so anyone who has both has already played the game and isn’t going to buy it again just for a little extra content. Especially when it is reputedly buggy on release and attached to Windows Live which I have only heard bad things about. It might also be a factor that more PC gamers are becoming a bit harder to convince with console ports because they are almost always done so badly.

I never bought UT3 because I tend to play story based games, I’m not a twitch gamer really and the only online FPS game I play is TF2 because it is more forgiving to those of us who mostly play RPG and adventure games. Plus I really like TF2’s fresh design, it has a lot of character.

It is also worth mentioning that UT3 came out in a year when FPS games swamped the market. I had already bought Bioshock, the Orange Box and chose Crysis over UT3 and was still playing through STALKER. (I still haven’t bought CoD4 yet)

It is a self-fullfiling prophecy, if the focus is put on consoles when making and marketing a game then that is where it will do best.

February 14th, 2008 at 6:52 pm

Larington says:

Err, the above should read:

Disarray. Heh, as far as I can tell, this disarray has been caused by the PS3 and XBOX360 pushing graphics and system performance far faster than was advisable from a development and production sense.

Sure, there are plenty of early adopters who have systems more than capable of running UT3 etcetera (And finding dissapointing, console inspired over simplification) but the vast majority of PC gamers are only just starting to consider getting a new PC, I myself am caught out, having discovered that I should’ve forked the extra cash out for a 1033 Mhz system a year ago instead of the now severely underpowered 800 Mhz one I have – Next computer will HAVE to be state of the art in case they pull this crap again.

Which brings me onto another bug issue, why are so many laptop suitable games (Settlers VI anyone?) carrying system requirements that say “Lap Tops not supported”, surely they’ve noticed the market for lap top supported games following the boom in lap top sales???

February 14th, 2008 at 7:10 pm

malkav11 says:

RE: Mods on consoles. Please note that the PS3 version of UT3 doesn’t actually have modding tools – those are all on PC. I think it’s quite possible we’ll start seeing plenty of user created content on modern consoles. Indeed I welcome it. But the PC is still going to be in the mix.

February 14th, 2008 at 8:28 pm

Jason says:

I’ll be controversial. I think this (along with some other “AAA” devs moving to console focus) suggests that consoles are on the road to becoming a hardcore niche, rather than being a mainstream gaming platform. Nothing wrong with it, just sayin’.

February 14th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

Max says:

Man, I really hated Gears of War. Though to be fair, I played it on the PC – I hear it’s worse than the native X360 version.

I fire it up every now and then, but I still can’t bring myself to play it for more than half an hour or so. It’s so dreadfully dull to look at, the controls are awful (Keyboard & Mouse AND Xbox 360 Controller for Windows; both awful) and the characters are completely uninteresting. Except that guy with the funny voice in the helmet (he’s in the picture up top) who got killed by a sniper. I was just starting to like him.

February 14th, 2008 at 10:21 pm

Rook says:

Which brings me onto another bug issue, why are so many laptop suitable games (Settlers VI anyone?) carrying system requirements that say “Lap Tops not supported”, surely they’ve noticed the market for lap top supported games following the boom in lap top sales???

I’m fairly sure this has to do with how horrendously awful the driver support is for laptop graphics chipsets. Unlike desktop cards where you can just get nVidia’s or ATi driver updates, the onus of keeping laptop graphics chipsets up to date with drivers is with the manufacturers, and most don’t bother.

February 15th, 2008 at 12:53 am

JP says:

The PC becoming the casual gaming platform where Peggle and friendly MMOs dominate?

Actually, take that on one side and then ultra-hardcore stuff like Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online on the other. PC gaming is where all the crazy extremes are at, consoles are the middle of the road. Not the easiest place to be if you’re chasing the money, but awesome if you’re a gamer with weird nichey (ahem – cultivated) tastes like me!

February 15th, 2008 at 3:36 am

sigma83 says:

The LIVE implementation made me want to murder people. It lost my save many times, causing unnecessary frustration.

Also, the trend of moving AWAY from quicksaving is seriously beginning to irritate me. Can anyone enlighten me towards the reason why checkpoints as the sole method of saving progress makes any kind of sense on a PC?

February 15th, 2008 at 9:17 am

Max says:

Right on, Frosty. :)

February 15th, 2008 at 4:03 pm

Scandalon says:

Slightly off-topic. (But more interesting/useful IMO):
So, uh, can anyone tell me *why*, exactly UTIII was/is so horrible? I tried the demo and it seemed very much like UT, but with more shiny, and some War of the Worlds , er, “inspired” vehicles… I used to be a big fan of Unreal/UT, didn’t have the right hardware during UT03/04 era, so I’m not sure what the deal is… So is the new UT horribly ruined by something, or just horribly too much like its ancestors?

February 15th, 2008 at 9:36 pm

CrashT says:

It’s interesting to consider his comments in light of the recent rumours of Microsoft possibly buying out Epic.

February 19th, 2008 at 6:21 pm