Despite the power of consoles and their ever-increasing reach, why does the humble PC remain the frontline for innovation in gaming?
You might have already heard the news: PC gaming is dead. Consoles, Facebook, tablets and phones – that’s supposedly where interactive entertainment’s future exclusively resides. Apparently, we’re told, consumers value ease of consumption over all else and the PC simply doesn’t stack up. After all, it’s more difficult to find enough space, set up your system, find your gaming mouse, download, install and start playing your game than it is to visit the App Store and, within seconds, start playing the latest Candy Clone.
And yet, the PC is performing rather healthily as a hotbed for gaming. In particular, it’s at the leading edge of much of what we see as innovative and ground-breaking in today’s game design and technology space. To be as blunt and reductive as possible: the exciting stuff is happening on PC. If it’s currently happening on consoles, too, then it probably was once, at some point, happening on PC.
Let’s take a brief moment to list a few of the ways that, in recent history, the PC has evolved the gaming space in ways that other systems have since adopted as norms. Digital distribution, free-toplay, social gaming, MMOs, usable level design tools, digital game refunds, full support for user-created game modifications, early access/in-development releases. These represent just a handful of what has been spawned from the PC game development and distribution community, the majority of them now visible in some form across home consoles, handhelds and mobile devices.
Why does the PC continue to represent the most fertile ground for brainstorming, developing and launching these concepts, some of which have resulted in genuinely disrupting, to an enormous degree, the way that the videogame business operates and views itself? Digital distribution, for instance, has had an earth shattering effect on not only game sales, but on who can now realistically go about releasing a game and getting it before the eyes of the right audience. With retailers taken out of the equation, the environment is ripe for an explosion of ideas from hitherto invisible talent.
It would be difficult to even envisage gaming in 2015 without digital distribution and the huge diversity of games that it has brought with it. Without the PC that diversity wouldn’t have been triggered, at least not as quickly or to the same scale.
We only have to look briefly into the past to see evidence of the PC’s continued success and overwhelming staying power. Where the likes of Atari, Sega, Jaguar, Commodore and more have failed to cultivate an audience and development scene over the long term, the PC has triumphed enormously thanks to a barrier of entry that is all but non-existent. The only real gatekeeper to PC development, once you own a PC, is the quality of your own development skills.
“PC gaming is the sole survivor of that Nineties gaming frontier,” explains Jamie Barber, development manager at nDreams, a Farnborough-based studio currently working on virtual reality game The Assembly. “The PC itself is a blank slate for developers – all manner of weird and wonderful development platforms and operating systems, both open and closed, are readily available for creative people to experiment and play with. That, in and of itself, is based on a long history of connectivity via modems and bulletin boards – communication and community has been there forever with a few of us remembering fondly the days of the BBS and Usenet!”
The opinion that the open nature of the PC platform, absent from the webs of approval bureaucracy that entangle even the simplest of modern console releases, leads to greater innovation is a sentiment that rings true for more than just Barber. CCP, too, maker of EVE Online and the upcoming EVE Valkyrie, cite openness as a major contributing factor to gaming advancements.
“I think the open nature of the PC platform lends itself well to innovation,” says Sean Deck, CCP’s SVP of product development. “That’s why you see people try new business models like F2P on PCs first, and from there take those lessons to other platforms.
“Obviously you have more games coming out on PC, where there are no gatekeepers, than on consoles. Good and bad titles, original and innovate stuff as well as imitations and more of the same. That’s one of the characteristics that makes the PC such a fascinating and competitive market. PC is a huge market, with the internet providing almost endless ways to reach the end users. It’s a fertile ground for indie developers and new developers entering the market.”
That market rarely shrinks. Given that PCs have been around for such a long time compared to modern consoles, their reach across demographics is enormous. You could feasibly come across a typical person of a certain age in the street and fail to be surprised if they tell you they’ve never played or owned a videogame console. It would be surprising if they told you they’d never owned or used a PC.
Such a large and diverse potential audience for your games provides not only the possibility of success, it also opens up many avenues for experimentation and testing of brand new ideas. Consoles, says Barber of nDreams, cannot hope to command such a valuable focus group:
“Reaching across all demographics, the PC makes experimenting with different audiences and payment models very straightforward. The PC does get the latest technologies first, but it also has by far the widest hardware gap with such a plethora of end-user configurations around. Inevitably, a lot of these technologies are unstable – some of them don’t make it whilst others do; whereas console are generally stable platforms with a focus on specific demographics and typical ultra-high standards for releases.”
Those ‘ultra-high standards’ for releases is what puts off many smaller, independent developers from building games specifically for consoles. By nature, many of these development projects utilise ideas and forms of play that are either completely fresh and new, or so rare that there are few games to compare them against. As a result, it becomes difficult for a platform holder to bestow their mark of approval upon such games – the form of the game so unusual that it runs the risk of not meeting the pre-defined criteria for a ‘high quality’ release. How, after all, does one traditionally judge the quality of something that is incomparable to anything else?
Console players, then, buy into a system with the knowledge (expectation, perhaps) that someone is working to make sure any and all available games meet a set of quality assurance guidelines. This, over time, creates a demographic of console players that become intolerant of anything that doesn’t meet these high standards. Experimental game development, with all of its trials, bugs and pitfalls, doesn’t tend to fit in with such company. Yet, it’s the experimental space rather than the rigid space of platform holder approvals, that leads to gaming evolution. In fact, much of the PC audience has gone the other way and have begun to adore those developers that are happy to open up development, via programs such as Steam’s Early Access and show their work as they go along – bugs and all. PC not only promotes the release of all kinds of weird and wacky ideas, it allows players to see how those ideas are generated, crafted and altered over the course of development. In turn, the feedback provided by the public to creators allows for tweaking and fine tuning of concepts before full release day.
“The weird thing about consoles, I guess, is that every generation they lock a bunch of people out,” explains Garry Newman, owner of Facepunch Studios and creator of both Garry’s Mod and Rust, when asked about the demographic of PC players and the size of the potential testing ground for new game ideas. “When people get a new PC they’ll give their old one away and add a new player [of PC games]. A new console usually means throwing away the last generation because no one wants it. So, there’s always going to be millions more PC players than console players.”
Newman came out of the modder community and, as such, is very much used to the idea that hordes of players around the world will happily, and sometimes forcefully, make their feelings regarding what you’ve made very clear. With that experience, releasing Rust through Early Access was the best thing possible for the game.
“People use Early Access for different reasons,” continues Newman when queried about how such a means of distribution can result in further PC gaming innovation. “Some use it as a promotional device, some use it as a funding device. We come from the world of modders so we believe you release as early as you can. The alternative to using Early Access for us was to release to a closed group of testers and develop in secret for two years. That would have sucked. It’s important to get that feedback and to update constantly. We released the same way for Garry’s Mod before Early Access existed.”
Without Early Access, concedes Newman, Rust would probably not have been released. The issue, he explains, is that his studio simply didn’t know whether what they’d already built would be something people would want to play. In such a situation, without the benefit of easy comparisons to other games, it’s unlikely that a platform holder would take a risk by green lighting such a risky project.
On PC, however, there’s comparatively little risk involved if you decide to release by yourself through Early Access. As such, more ideas are put in front of the public and concepts that hadn’t previously existed are given a chance to take on a life on their own. “We were 50/50 on whether we had [with Rust] something worth continuing with,” Newman continues. “We couldn’t justify spending any more time on it and not knowing. We decided that if we released on Early Access it will either be accepted and take off, or we’ll iterate until it takes off – but in the meantime it would at least be funding its own development.
“On the PC, if I have an idea in the morning I can sit down and code it. By 5pm there could be 20,000 people all over the world playing what I made. You don’t need to ask for permission, you don’t need to buy hardware or apply for a licence, you don’t have to go through a certification process. That’s the big difference [between console and PC] as far as I’m concerned.” Newman, in fact, goes further than to merely suggest that licensing and certification hurdles are the reason for the comparative lack of innovation on consoles. He believes that the platform holders don’t want change, given that changes in market activity can result in unpredictable future behaviour from consumers. Unpredictability, for a company with shareholders to please, is not a positive state of affairs.
“I think one of the big problems for consoles,” says Newman, “is that they see games like DayZ come out and blow up. They know they can’t get the game on their platform with their current certification bullshit, so they have to work around that. They aren’t evolving willingly, they’re being forced into it.
“To be honest, I think if they had any balls and foresight they would have never shipped with a disc drive. They’d just have a big-ass, open-to-anyone app store and said ‘Fuck you’ to everyone without internet. Because that’s the future.”
The openness of the PC platform, resulting in it being the perfect base from which to test new ideas and innovate on design, has also paid dividends for The Forest developer, Endnight Games. Like Rust, The Forest was launched through Steam’s Early Access program and, as such, has been playable since well before the completion of development.
“First of all, [without Early Access] The Forest probably wouldn’t exist at all,” admits Endnight Games’ co-founder Anna Terekhova. “I knew starting this that it was a big concept. A world where you can chop down all the trees and build whatever you want, craft tools and weapons, hunt, fish, fight an intelligent enemy and uncover a story that would be told in a new way – i.e. without cutscenes or dialogue…
“I do think the freedom to just make whatever you want and try to find an audience for it on PC does allow someone like us to make something like The Forest. At the same time, though, a few days after the original rough trailer was posted onto Steam Greenlight, Sony called. A couple of months later, Microsoft was in contact. I think all platforms are interested in new ideas and quality games.”
All platforms are interested in quality games, but all other platforms are looking to PC first to try and uncover those quality games. Microsoft and Sony might be/have been interested in bringing The Forest to their platforms, but there’s little chance the game would have ever even got to the trailer phase without the wide open doorway offered by the PC.
“Starting out we had no real way of making a console game; no dev kit and no licence,” Terekhova continues. “Making a game for PC made sense. If it was possible to just load builds onto a retail PS4 or Xbox One then it’s possible we would have started down that route.”
At present, that console route simply isn’t viable for a developer hoping to turn an idea into reality, especially if that idea is somewhat unusual. The cost, licensing and certification process turns the business aspects of releasing a game on console into a full time job, adding to the already time-consuming process of building a game. As many of the teams working on innovative projects tend to be small – Endnight Games consists of just three full-time employees – there is little spare time or resources to dedicate to these red tape processes.
Deck of CCP believes that the future of the PC is bright and that it will continue to act as an important platform no matter the nature of other devices: “I think that anyone who is involved with this industry, as well as any serious gamers out there, knows that the PC is a healthy and vibrant platform. It is not going away anytime soon. Sure, we’ve seen new platforms emerging, not only in the past few years but during the last few decades. The growing gaming industry has been thriving on platforms other than PC, and the latest console and mobile platforms have reinforced that trend, but it has not proved to be negative for the PC as a platform.”
Newman echoes the idea that the PC will continue to thrive given the sheer scale of the install base and the diverse nature of the games developed for it. However, he isn’t wedded to the PC to the point that he wouldn’t consider developing for another platform. If something better comes along, far enough. Only it’s difficult for him to entertain thoughts as to what sort of platform that might be…
“As long as there are people with PCs there will be people willing to sell games to them. If no one is playing PC games anymore then I don’t think anyone will be sad. That’d be like being sad that no one is making games for the Amiga anymore. If we stop making games for PC then we’ll have all moved onto something much, much better – I can’t even start to imagine what that would be, though.”