The PC Gaming Crysis or Box Office Blues

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In the rush to turn Gaming (both PC and console) into a main stream entertainment industry, are our beloved developers, publishers and gamers shooting themselves in the feet?  Is the striving for a "best voice acting in FPS" Oscar pushing Gaming into a space which is not set up to properly handle or quantify the medium?  Is the longing to have Gaming up there with Football, Movies, and long walks on the beach going to put undue pressure and stifle development as we see in the Movie industry?

The Gaming industry used to work on the slow burn principle.  There would be some ads in the trade papers and a game would be released and reviewed.  The sales would be driven by word of mouth and reviews from the people you trusted, or what was available on the shelf.  In the PC space I guess not much has changed, but when you glance over at the behemoth that is the console space, things have become a little, well, Hollywood.

I guess when you have only 3 players in the space, and one is also in the movie business, you're bound to see a few dollars being thrown around.  Exhibit A: The marketing campaign for Halo 3.  So it is no wonder that the stakes are higher, and I guess that it was inevitable that Gaming would be measured in the same ways as the other mainstream entertainment medias are.  And just as we see the clashing of old school thinking with new technology in music and movies, we are seeing gaming being forced into a mould that in the end won't be good for PC gaming.

I don't want to harp on Crysis but it was well documented because everyone else was harping on it, so it makes for a good example.  November 2007 was an OK month in general but the highlights were the release of Crysis on the 13th and UT3 on the 19th.  At the end of the month of the November, a couple of weeks later, both games were canned by press and bloggers as failures.  Fair enough if those couple of weeks were all that mattered, like for example, a movie.  We will never know if the bad press hurt sales or not, but I can't see how it would have helped much.  Having such high profile PC games seemingly fail began the question "is PC Gaming Dead?", which I even weighed in on.  Even though my comments were directed at the future of hardware, and a shift in the way gaming is done, we all commented without remembering the "slow burn principle".

Over the month of December, Crysis rose to 2nd place in the NPD's, and EA announced 1 million sales worldwide a couple of months later.  Crysis still sells well as do most PC games.  Well, PC Gamers have to play something during the WOW maintenance Tuesday nights.  But I wonder how much the "first week failure" will become a factor in the future of PC Gaming.  Gaming is big business, and like any big money making business it needs to make money now.  $170 million in the first week is going to make shareholders happier than $170 million over 6 months or a year.  And at the moment, those sorts of figures in that time frame has only been achieved in the console market.

Comparing games to movies is dumb, and we really need to think of them differently.  I prefer to put gaming in the same section as books, and it is a better fit.  Books promote imagination and knowledge and can allow you to escape, a good game in a genre that appeals to you can do the same.  This isn't that marketable though and gamers want to make gaming as mainstream as movies and similar media, in an effort to add meaning to their lives.  I do agree that there are some real artists in the industry, and that they should be paid well and recognised, but we need to think about what the future will be if we don't stop and get the systems sorted now.

We may start to see a bit more on this subject in the upcoming months as we await the release of GTA4 for the consoles, and Fallout 3 for the PC.  From the hype GTA4 is already a success, and Fallout should do well but it will be an interesting match up, I wonder if the loser will be Ironman?

Jason