There is a crisis going on with the PC Gaming lately. Iron Lore, developers of Titan Quest, have called it quits. Clifford Bleszinski, lead designer of Gears of War, stated that the PC Industry is in a disarray. Reflexive’s director of marketing Russell Carrol wrote an article on Gamasutra about PC Piracy. It seems everyone wants to play Chicken Little, which I don’t understand because who the hell wants to listen to a chicken? Not me.
So instead of being the pessimistic ass like everyone else, I’m going to give suggestions to PC developers on how to make gamers give a damn about them. I’m not speaking as some idiot marketing guru or an experienced game developer, because that would make me a liar. I merely speak as a gamer who has money, meaning I don’t have to tug mommy’s skirt when I want a new game. In short,
I’m your audience.
Why would I do this? Because I feel like I’m part of a community and you guys treated me well during my high school years. So naturally, I’m going to feel the need to give something back. At first I thought I should slap everyone, but traveling all the way to Dallas and California is not cheap. Although I could make a trip to Montreal to slap Ubisoft, but then I would have some French on my hand and that stuff is hard to wash off. Instead, here’s some words of advice.
STOP MAKING MMORPGS
I might as well start with the one thing that pisses me the most. Just walk into any EB Games and look at the PC section. Chances are you will be introduced to a wall of MMORPGs that can challenge the Great Wall of China to a duel. It gets worse when some of these terrible games decide to have a collector’s edition with the box big enough to threaten small children.
Let’s get one thing straight: There are way too many MMORPGs out there. Most of them are no more interesting than getting mauled by a grizzly bear with rabies. Yes, we know that MMORPGs can be the cash cow, but the problem is that cow has already been taken by World of Warcraft.
WOW worked because it managed to get its mechanics polished and secured their success by evolving beyond a mere videogame. It has a trading card game, a board game, a manga series, and collectible figures. How crazy does a developer have to be to try to mimic a game with that kind of padding?
The only way to get a piece of that MMO-pie is if they don’t try to copy anything from WOW. How about a sci-fi FPS where players can form corporations and fight for resource-rich colonies? Or a low fantasy setting where magic is the enemy with players forced to co-operate by building cities and equipment to defend themselves? There are countless themes waiting to be discovered which can innovate the genre. The only thing a developer is accomplishing by making yet another game involving the genocide of wilderness creatures is making me laugh. Hell, my balls will laugh. My ass will probably laugh too. We’ll laugh in unison, which would be awesome.
The other way is to simply not get involved in the MMO market. Quick, how many truly successful MMORPGs have been made? Give up? Because I can only count four: Everquest, Ultima Online, Eve Online, and World of Warcraft. Now compare that to the number of them already released and you’ll soon realize spending time on yet another one is just as productive as eating your own money. Take a look at companies like Valve, Stardock, and Infinity Ward; none of them had to rely on the MMO bandwagon to be successful.
GET RID OF COPY PROTECTION
According to Albert Einstein, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So my question to any developer who uses copyright protection: Are you insane or just retarded? Pick one, you can’t be both.
For years companies have tried countless ways to stop piracy and most of them were futile. Even the ones that require online authentication like World of Warcraft and Steam were cracked by pirates. Yet these brilliant sages who make our games still continue to use these failed protection programs that screw legitimate users like an 8-year-old in a Catholic Summer Camp.
Case in point: Bioshock has a SecuROM protection software that requires an internet connection to “activate” the game and finish the installation. However, you can only activate twice, meaning once you’ve done two installations, you’re screwed. The sad part is pirates who “fixed” this protection were viewed as heroes.
It doesn’t stop there. Some games are programmed to crash if the protection conditions weren’t met. Recent example was Titan’s Quest where at several keypoints in the game, it would check if you had a pirated copy. If your copy was pirated, it would crash itself, but it also made the game unstable. There is also the constant CD checks that kills game performance, something I find baffling because these games don’t even need the CD in the drive to play. I understand the need to protect one’s product from theft, but to automatically assume I’m a criminal when I’m throwing money at the register monkey in EB Games just doesn’t make any sense. Cut the archaic B.S., it doesn’t work and it’s pissing people off.
DEMOS, DEMOS, DEMOS
This applies more to the entire gaming industry than PC gaming itself, but it’s something that needs to be addressed. Demos suck. I don’t want to spend an hour trying to download a behemoth size file so I get to play the game for five minutes. Demos are being so horribly made these days that some have put a disclaimer saying “This demo doesn’t represent the quality of the final product”. What the hell? The whole point behind a demo is to sell me the game. If they can’t even make a demo properly, what makes these guys think I want to fork out money for the real deal?
We need to get back on the days of Shareware. For those who don’t know, you bought a game off a store that was more of a glorified demo for around 5 to 10 bucks. For the most part, they had one entire episode to play which was a few hours of gameplay. You might have not ended buying the full game, but at least you were supporting the developer to a certain extent. The other important factor is they gave a very good overall impression and experience of the game, something modern demos fail to accomplish.
For example, Call of Duty 4 can have a multiplayer demo that allows you to play on every map but only in team deathmatch and you cannot level up. Devil May Cry 4 could’ve had the first five missions playable, excluding the cutscenes and leveling up. But why stop with restricted demos? Steam can allow users to “rent” a full game for a day or two for a price. They already allow its users to play certain games for free on weekends.
The current model for demos simply doesn’t work. Hiding numerous features and admitting the demo is garbage aren’t good ways to generate interest in a game. No sane person would buy a car off the spot without giving a test drive to experience it first hand. Why can’t video games have a similar aspect?
MAKE YOUR GAME RUN WELL
They are two things I want when I buy a PC game: Stability and Performance. Failure in either category will make me pissed off at the game, then it will make me pissed at the guys who made the game. It’s going piss me off so much that I will camp a block away from their HQ with a catapult and a family of radioactive moose. Then I will chuck the moose into the HQ and laugh as I watch the developer’s faces vaporize in a nuclear blast before mine does. After that, I will be in hell with them and I will still be annoying with my new buddy Adolf Hitler.
I feel this way because I have been screwed over by buggy games in the past. I’ve had experiences such as laggy multiplayer on LAN, uninstallation being a threat to my hard drive, and games running terrible thanks to poor optimization. I’ve become so paranoid about buying new PC games that I started wearing a tinfoil hat at electronic stores and it’s really hard to get customer service when you look like a douche. Whatever happened to simply buying the game and playing it? I don’t remember waiting weeks for a patch to make Doom or Red Alert playable. Buying a PC game nowadays is a 60 dollar
risk.
If the bugs won’t ruin your enjoyment, the performance will. Most mainstream PC games require top of the line hardware to get them to run in acceptable framerates. This is something I don’t understand because developers are trying to run a business, yet they cater to the minority of people who spend thousands of dollars on their PC each year. So even if you wanted to give your money to them, they are telling you to piss off because you don’t have Nvidia’s latest 800 dollar tattoo on your asscheek.
Meanwhile, games with outdated graphics like World of Warcraft and more recently, Sins of the Solar Empire, welcome cheap bastards like me with open arms. Last time I checked, WOW has enough subscribers to rival Christianity and SOTSE is on top of the sales charts banging Playboy models. Fortunately, companies are taking note of this and are developing games that don’t require a powerful computer. Such examples include Sony’s The Agency and EA’s Battlefield Heroes. Hopefully in a few months, I can list more than two games because this is a model the PC industry needs to adapt to bring people away from consoles.
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