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PC gaming will never die, the producer of upcoming PC only RTS Dawn of War 2 has bullishly claimed.
Speaking in an interview with VideoGamer.com, to be published next week, associate producer Jeff Lydell said that while game piracy is “not going away”, as long as people want PCs they’ll want PC games.
The death of PC gaming has been one of 2008’s hot topics, with a number of high profile game developers bemoaning PC game sales and the threat of piracy.
Recently Lionhead boss Peter Molyneux told VideoGamer.com that the PC gamer market was “in tatters”. LucasArts explained to us in an interview from earlier in the year that it wasn’t doing a PC version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed because of the vast differences in power of PCs in people’s homes and the lack of scalability of the game.
Earlier in the year Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Michael de Plater told VG247 that a PC version of EndWar would most likely be shipping alongside the console SKUs if it wasn’t for rampant PC piracy, and that copyright theft is essentially destroying the PC games market.
Lydell told VideoGamer.com: “PC gaming has been ‘dead’ since 1994 and it continues to ‘die’ every year. But that’s obviously not true, because there are people playing PC games. It’s just that we’re seeing changes in the types of PC games they’re playing. A lot of the things that the PC had that were exclusive to it, like online experiences, are starting to come over to consoles – so it’s less of a hold-out for that kind of social interaction. There’s Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network – even the Wii has online components. So back in the day when Quake was defining how gamers interacted with each other online, PC gaming was ‘dying’ then! And I’d consider that to be the golden days. The N64 didn’t kill it, the PlayStation 2 didn’t kill it, and I don’t think any of the upcoming consoles will kill it.”
When asked if he thought PC gaming will ever die, Lydell replied: “No. It’ll die the day we stop having PCs! Right now, we all want to have PCs. We’re seeing some changes where people are adopting laptops more. Maybe in the future when we’re using integrated devices that aren’t quite PCs, we’ll see games on those instead. But PC gaming isn’t dying.”
On the issue of piracy, he admitted: “It’s certainly a threat to triple A gaming. It makes developers and publishers reluctant to invest large amounts of money in a just-pc product, unless there’s some form of guarantee. Sometimes they hedge their bets with cross-platform developments, sometimes it’s persistent online stuff that you need to subscribe to.
“But piracy is not going away,” he added. “As an industry, piracy is something we have to work around, not something to try and eliminate – because that’s a losing fight.”
You’ll find a brand new hands-on preview of the game, which is shaping up wonderfully, right here.
What do you think about Lydell’s statements on PC gaming? Let us know in the comments section below.
