magerette
Hedgewitch
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In the never-ending controversy surrounding piracy, revenue and console vs pc gaming, Extreme Tech has an article up entitled 'Consoles as We Know Them are Gone' interviewing Alex St. John, CEO of Wild Tangent on the eventual triumph of the PC as a gaming platform and some of the reasons why this is likely:
This is a long and interesting article, so I'll limit myself to one more quote about piracy. St John asks and answers this question:ExtremeTech:...Epic Games' Tim Sweeney, I'm sure you heard, put forth a very widely posted quote, "PCs are good for anything, just not games." That was taken out of context; he'd been asked about mainstream computers that lack graphics and audio power. How do you react to that quote?
Alex St. John: I've known Tim Sweeney a long time, and he makes a very important point. To be clear, PCs are fantastic gaming platforms, in spite of Intel and Microsoft. And they should absolutely be pinioned for the stupid stuff they've done to make the PC not as good a gaming platform as it would inherently be without their help screwing it up.
And so the shame of it is, the PC's a fantastic gaming platform, superior to anything anybody's every imagined, superior to every console, and Microsoft and Intel put crap in the PC that make it not so good. And so if you see a PC that is not denuded by things interfering with it by Microsoft and Intel, in many cases like an Intel crappy graphics chip, or a bloated Vista operating system, it's a fantastic gaming platform. And the shame is, if the low end of the PC market, the mass market PCs that everybody buys did not come with these crappy graphics chips on them and was not burdened with a fat OS, that the PC would be a larger contiguous gaming platform than all the next-generation consoles combined, probably would be clearly superior; the PC is the home of the most profitable game in history generating more revenue than the top 10 console games combined—that's World of Warcraft generating a 1.2 billion dollars a year in revenue, that's a pure PC game.
So it is clear that PC gaming absolutely killed [the market] in terms of revenue, killed it in terms of consumer usage—the average console gamer, according to Powers Associates, spends more time playing PC games than console games.
More information.ASJ:..Why is World of Warcraft the most profitable game on the PC?...
ET: Community
ASJ: Yeah, but what makes it so profitable?...There's one very important feature: DRM. You can't...steal the thing...
You can't pirate a community. So an MMO has two properties that make it hugely valuable. One is community; frankly, that's almost secondary. The truth is, you can't steal a community-based game. And because you can't steal it, you get all the revenue from it. All a console is is a giant DRM device. A console's job is not to enable you to play games, but to stop you from playing games you didn't pay for. If a console goes online, and plays community based games, its primary value, the reason Microsoft and Sony make the console and get a third of all the revenue, because they control the DRM and security...[becomes]... irrelevant if the games are community based games. The developers don't need their DRM and community; therefore, what idiot would share revenue with them?
[IF]You just make PC community games you're gonna reach everybody, because the average console gamer plays more PC games than console games—they have a PC—so again, you're out of business.
A real migration from CD games to online games would break the console business model, so you either have to make up an entirely new one, or believe that consoles as we know them are gone.
- Joined
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