id Software co-founder and Doom creator John Romero recently talked to GamesIndustry about the parallels of developing for the PC back in the 80s and 90s, and the rise of the indie scene that has taken place over the last several years. He said that anyone can publish a game; just look at what Mojang did with Minecraft, or what Zynga did with the original Farmville.
"Nowadays, because there are so many SDKs to create with and people can put their apps out there on a store without any real publisher intervention, everybody can publish. There's no stopping anybody. Minecraft was put up on a webpage - you can publish on the web, you can publish through app stores, there's no one stopping you," Romero said.
What developers of the 2010s need is better marketing, he said. One way he hinted at was to use the free-to-play model. Take Doom for instance. The whole first episode was provided as free "shareware." If the player didn't like the game, then only time was lost. If the player wanted more, then they could purchase a key or a full copy of the game at retail stores. He believes that the recent surge of free-to-play games is shaking up the industry "for good," just as shareware did.
"That was a really fair way to market a game," Romero said. "When we put these games out on shareware, that changed the whole industry. Before shareware there were no CD-ROMs, there were no demos at all. If you wanted to buy Ultima, Secret of Monkey Island, any of those games, you had to look really hard at that box and decide to spend 50 bucks to get it."
Earlier in the interview, he said that thanks to free-to-play and $5 games on Steam, the PC platform is "decimating" consoles just in price alone. Even more, free-to-play has supposedly killed off a hundred AAA studios. The problem with consoles is that they're not only a closed platform, but they're getting hurt by the free-to-play trend on PC and mobile.
"The problem with console is that it takes a long time for a full cycle," he said. "With PCs, it's a continually evolving platform, and one that supports backward compatibility, and you can use a controller if you want; if I want to play a game that's [made] in DOS from the '80s I can, it's not a problem. You can't do that on a console."
Follow Kevin Parrish @exfileme. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
I can see steam potentially having this danger where games, really frigging expensive things to make if you want AAA quality not being profitable anymore and causing people to leave the industry because people aren't game to gamble on investment.
That means ultimately less quality choice for the consumer.
Don't get me wrong steams great, and surprisingly there are still some really good games in there, but people should be wary of it and not let it monopolize game distribution or PC gaming could end up being about flappy bird clones and yet-another-fake-8-bit-shovelware apps and not about high quality compelling and deep games like PC games should
Back by demand is absolutely right. Nothing said here is "elitism", it's just a fact of life. Consoles save money because their hardware costs are subsidized by game licencing fees. The company can eat $100 or $200 and sell the console at a reduce price compared to a comparable PC of similar specs. But they do this because they make $10 or so on every game they sell. The first few games in the life cycle recoup the cost of the hardware, and every game after that is just money in their pocket. Over a 6, 7, 8 year life cycle of a game, people buy dozens, if not hundreds of games.
PC you have to invest slightly more in hardware, but facts are facts. Free 2 Play, steam sales, indie games, backwards compatibility. The end result is that console initial purchases may be slightly cheaper, but over the long run PC is drastically cheaper than consoles. Even if you buy upgraded hardware every year or 2. The cost of PC games after F2P and Steam sales covers those costs many times over.
Do not mistake plain fact for "elitism" please.
PITA, but doable none the less and in the case of most games released in the past 15 - 20 years is completely doable with little to no effort.
Also, the Mario Kart argument isn't very valid. I love Mario Kart 8, and I own a lot of toys, to include SHIELD, tablets, Wii U, PCs, a HTPC, 3DS, etc etc. But there is nothing functionality wise that a PC can't do that the Wii U does.
I can play 2 - 4 player racing games using Xbox 360 controllers on my HTPC.
The comment by Romero is mostly pointing out that PC has all the strengths, without any of the console weaknesses, at a fraction of the cost. These are just facts. It's not saying "PCz rule don't buy consoles u noob". He was just kindly explaining the current state of affairs and nothing he said was even remotely debatable.
Note how the word "Daikatana" is missing here.... :p