The PC aka Windows PC is leading the technology market, as usual.
Look at the mini arcade stick on the left. It screams “play with me!”
In an interesting and quite unexpected move Q-Games, a company working closely with Nintendo and Sony, released its game PixelJunk Eden on Steam, the Windows PC client that rules them all (not really my opinion, but you have to read people’s comments, they LOVE Steam and want everything on it).
Only fairly old people like me see the change, with Capcom releasing his Street Fighter IV on consoles and Windows PC with just a few months of delay. It was years for Street Fighter II and the port was terrible. Street Fighter IV runs smoothly on netbooks. By the way they still sold 25+ millions of these mini laptops in 2011, pretty much on part with other devices that are “taking over”.
People can’t stop talking about the “next” thing, mobile or tablets. The PC market is so enormous, it just keeps growing. It is the blue ocean. Double Fine’s crazy Kickstarted project is scheduled for Windows PC first -and by the time I typed this, they have the money to do the ports-. The most interesting 2011 games are happening on Windows PC -The Witness, Spy party, Dear Esther-. The great, free Stealth Bastard is on Windows. Humble Bundle can thank Windows for making them so rich and successful (70% of their revenues on average).
The argument for PCs is not the up to ten times faster hardware (everything is fast enough today, even your microwave can run Crysis) it’s about the fact that you don’t have to deal with gatekeepers and just focus on the more than crucial part, building a good game.
This is common knowledge, there’s nothing new under the sun but I still have to write about it. Nobody wants to acknowledge that because it butthurts their brand whore-ish minds but it totally is the best, most stable scenario since a couple of years: prototype on Windows, release on Windows, get noticed, build a community, attract money and port. World of Goo. Aquaria. Osmos. Blizzard, Valve. Frozen Synapse, the list goes on. It’s the best for everybody. Freedom from the developer first aiming the biggest platform, reducing risks and then aiming for different experiences, smaller markets with other devices. For gamers everything is a la carte, no more I need to have this hardware to play this because everybody has a PC. Then if you really want to have the game on your PS Tada 3000 4G, ask for it or even finance it. You get to communicate with developers. The Double Fine experiment -crowd sourced adventure game design?- is interesting in this sense.
Weirdly despite being a gigantic hardware pool, The PC architecture is so old now that a shit ton of problems are solved, have been solved or can be circumvented. On mobile and tablets? Problems just keep popping out -screen size, supported or unsupported APIs, bots– and you usually have no fucking margin, thank you closed and tight ecosystem.
Which brings me to another blog post.