PC gaming has sunk from its once mighty heights, thanks to a combination of factors like console penetration, piracy and the huge inherent variability in PC hardware setups. These have interacted in various ways to push the PC to third class citizen for many gaming genres, especially the kind of high adrenaline action games that were once the PC's bread and butter.
This has led to the situation where once proud PC developers have wholeheartedly adopted console development. We've seen PC centric studios like Crytek (Crysis), id Software (Doom, Quake etc) and Epic (Unreal series) effectively abandon the PC platform in favor of consoles. Several of these have dropped comments in the aftermath blaming piracy as the reason behind the exodus to consoles.
Epic is a company that has been vocal in its shift towards consoles, with many controversial statements dropped over the years in reference to piracy being the reason. Back in 2008 Epic's Cliffy B was famously quoted as saying "Here's the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. "
A few months ago Edge magazine quoted Epic's President Mike Capps as saying "We still do PC, we still love the PC, but we already saw the impact of piracy: it killed a lot of great independent developers and completely changed our business model."
This followed up from quotes given in a 2008 interview with Gamesindustry.biz, where Capps stated that "...Crytek just put out some numbers saying the ratio was 20:1 on Crysis, for pirated to non-pirated use. So guess what? That's why there's no Gears of War 2 on PC, because there's no market, because copying killed it - and that's gruesome to a company like ours that's been in the PC market for so long."
While these comments certainly angered a lot of PC gamers, they certainly highlighted just how much of an impact piracy made on game sales. Things are changing though, and the PC is becoming less and less of a third class citizen in the gaming world. This has been highlighted through a recently published interview by the excellent PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun and Epic's VP Mark Rein.
In it Rein spends some time reinforcing the commitment of Epic to the PC. This is through both the Unreal Development Kit, used to build games with the company's Unreal Engine, and the upcoming game Bulletstorm, which is due to be released on the consoles and the PC at the same time. He puts his support behind the PC as a platform, almost in direct contradiction to the statements that have come from the rest of the company in recent years.
What does this bode for the future?
This all begs the question of why the turnaround. Piracy is still just as easy as it ever was, but things like Valve Software's digital distribution service Steam have shown that people will pay for PC games. But this writer can't help but think there is a different motive behind the renewed PC focus, one that has more to do with Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's 3D PlayStation3 titles than any of the traditional market drivers.
Both of these technologies are very mass-market focused, and are designed to stretch out the lifespan of the current console generation. The current generation of consoles is intended to last in the market for a lot longer than the previous ones. Console manufacturers are betting that motion detection and 3D technologies should revitalize the platforms. This should let Sony and Microsoft squeeze a few more years out of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This is great if you are a game developer, but not particularly exciting if your business is developing and selling the engines that drive console games.
Epic may make the occasional game, but its core business is the Unreal engine. This is one of the most successful game engines at the moment, but it already pushes console hardware to its limits. The only platform that is evolving its graphics hardware is the PC - the current consoles essentially use DirectX 9 hardware, while the latest PC hardware supports the DirectX 11 standard.
Given the nature of 3D graphics hardware it is near inevitable that when the next generation of console hardware arrives it will use whatever the latest DirectX graphics standard is. It follows that engines developed to take advantage of these features on the PC will be in a great position to be sold to those developing for consoles. This means that for a company like Epic PC development will become more and more important as the current generation of consoles approaches the end of its lifespan.
Of course, this is very similar to what Crytek did with Crysis. The company focused on the PC and developed an engine intended to show off just what a bleeding edge PC title can do. Then massive numbers of people rewarded their efforts by pirating the game, driving Crytek to a much less ambitious console focus for the Crysis sequel. It remains to be seen whether the rise in digital distribution outlets since that point will manage to minimize the impact of piracy and encourage Epic to actually stick with the PC this time around.