I think it's simply because that while the hardcore PC audience is VERY hardcore, it's also reasonably small compared to the console markets.
I guess most outlets don't really discuss it because their's not enough of an audience there.
PC gaming has definitely had a resurgence, which I mostly put down to Minecraft and partly due to the cheaper-than-ever-before prices and bargains, but all of those people who came for Minecraft won't stay to read the journalism behind it.
That's simply not true.
1) Steam accounts are growing at a rate faster than Xbox Live and PSN.
2) The most-played video games in the world are PC games.
3) Money spent on computer gaming is growing quite a bit. A year or two ago, a higher-up at EA said that the PC may become their biggest platform, based on the way things are growing. He's not the only one.
There's just something about PC gaming that inherently pushes away the mainstream, even in situations where a PC game is actually quite accessible both in term of owning it and in terms of playing it.
Like right now, System Shock 2 is $5 on Steam and was recently made available on Linux (in addition to Mac). You no longer have to mod it up to get it running on today's computers, and it will run on shitty laptops. All you gotta do is just rebind the keys and you can go ahead and play one of the greatest games ever -- the best BioShock game basically. But BioShock fans will probably never notice it until it get's ported to a console.
Right. How many retrospectives are you going to get of that? NOT MANY. Meanwhile, you'll get random stuff about Zelda pretty much all the time. Even just generic retrospectives or whatever are going to talk about it. And ffs, System Shock 2 is literally one of the most influential games ever
made, with most of this-gen's biggest titles borrowing mechanics from it in some way, shape, or form. Zelda's influence is
nothing compared to SS2 (what, mechanics like Z-targeting and repetitive dungeon design? Obsolete and frequently complained about).
Not trying to disparage Zelda here. It's a bit like saying Jaws isn't as great as The Godfather. They're both EXCELLENT. System Shock 2 just has way more of an impact, and it was pretty much completely ignored on its rerelease.
I do sympathize with not getting technical reviews of PC games since knowledge of performance and bugs are important to know for a platform that doesn't support rentals. Otherwise, I don't have a reason to care whether a reviewer specifically states that he/she played the PC version over a console version.
It's not just technical stuff. The journalists I mentioned as awesome? They're the kind of people who understood
how games worked, well enough, in many cases, to make their own. A lot of the console-oriented games journalists write critiques that are pretty much "um, well, I had fun playing it, and it looked nice." Understanding the underlying ideas behind a work of art leads to good criticism.
Some of the best film critics that have ever lived also happen to be some of the best filmmakers. If we want better reviews, then we need the kind of people who actually care about how games are made, designed, and work. We don't get nearly enough of that.
This means basically nothing in context to what he said.
I read almost all of that, by the way.
Thanks. I realize it was long, and ran out of time to throw some pictures in to break up the flow. I am just in a tremendous amount of pain and wanted to distract myself.
As soon as you mentioned Shadow Warrior, I was firmly in agreement. I like to think I keep abreast of gaming news, I'm on GAF for crying out loud, but I would have never heard of Shadow Warrior, or even thought it was a decent title, if I weren't recommended it by a friend. I mean, it has a metacritic score of 73, which doesn't inspire confidence. I bought it for cheap, went in with low expectations, and it took me for a ride. My PC is getting on in years, but it still looked astounding, superb lighting, and the gunplay and swordplay had some of the best game-feel I've experienced in years. The storytelling reminded me of Bulletstorm in some ways, in that it appears infantile on the surface, but betrayed a much more thoughtful nature underneath it. It was one of the best games I had the joy to play last year, and it nearly passed me by.
I mean, I hadn't heard anything about Dragon Commander to make me interested in it before reading this thread. I looked up a couple of videos, and it looks absolutely glorious, and I know I'm going to have to check it out soon. Why don't these games get the attention they deserve? It may well be that they're PC exclusives, but might that be the sole cause? Perhaps it's due to developer pedigree. Larian have more of it, but still very nichey, but Flying Wild Hog only have Hard Reset, which met with a similarly quiet launch. Still not a good excuse.
I get the impression that Rock, Paper, Shotgun are really the best source to find out about these PC games, but that's at the cost of more widespread gaming coverage. I see no reason why PC games would be overlooked elsewhere, particularly when mobile games are given so much unnecessary attention. I would have thought a hardcore gaming website would be much better suited catering to PC gamers rather than mobile gamers.
And OP, do try your best to get to see a doctor soon. I've only heard bad stories from people who had left doctor-visits too late. All best.
What bugs me is that RPS and PCG are the only people who cover this stuff. We should see general gaming websites cover it, and we
don't. It's a bunch of people who grew up with console games, and who tend to use macs rather than build their own computers, covering this stuff. People who liked playing games. Some of the writers I'm quick to criticize are people who show now interest in the way games work, just their personal response to them. What they don't get is that their response is influenced by how these games are designed--it's like they don't care about understanding their impressions.
All good points, but I'm looking at this from a higher vantage point. There are some examples where PC versions did better, but the larger industry trends aren't going in that direction. The Steam Machine may change that, but let's leave a question mark above it for now. Currently, most of the smart people in the room agree that PC game sales are still a fraction of consoles, and will be for the foreseeable future.
I'm not dumping on PCs or service platforms for them, but I'm trying to offer some perspective on that point.
The data I've seen indicate that this is far from the truth. If I can get some time--and I probably won't, I've got three or four massive projects to work on this week.
I don't write reviews, so this is a little out of my wheelhouse. But you make a good point here -- I overwhelmingly see console-focused reviews in the many I tend to read. Didn't Ars make a commitment a couple years ago to focus on PCs? I wonder where that went.
Again, part of it's just about coverage. We see spikes in sales when these games get coverage. When do they get coverage? Most often when they're going to get a console version. What we have are primarily console gamers not paying attention to games until these games hit the platforms they prefer--then these people go off and write about them, so the consumers become aware of said games. "People don't read about PC games that much" is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy.
On Twitter, right now, a dev has posted a question asking whether it's common to get requests for console codes after the PC version has already been reviewed. In all my time, I've seen a great deal of sites go back and review a game once it's rereleased on consoles--I don't think I've
ever seen a site review the PC version.
Games journalism is VERY MUCH "meh, I don't care--oh, now it's on consoles? Sure, let's cover it!"
This is again getting a little out of my wheelhouse, since I make an active effort not to be promotional in my coverage, but I'm curious why posts about trailers matter to anyone other than the companies and their PR agencies who meticulously track this type of thing. Do you want to see the game succeed and so you believe additional coverage (even a paragraph and a YouTube link) will do that?
Consider another aspect of this: A lot of indies (and particularly small ones) do not employ PR people. PR people have databases and blast lists and know which reporters cover what, etc. Of course, reporters need to go out and learn about these types of games on their own, but there's only so much time in a day.
This I take issue with. I think you're assuming that correlation and causation. Unless a journalist has said they flat out refuse, my guess is that they don't have resources to cover every turn of the screw for every game.
1. I have spoken with indies who have been flat-out refused.
2. I pitched several articles to some sites recently. One site accepted some stuff, but rejected a piece of mine about one of the weirdest indie games in development right now (and its designer has a really cool personal story, I think, as he's very much an outsider to games), on the grounds that they'd "covered it before." The only article they had was one for the Kickstarter. This same site has run about 30-40 articles on various Pokemon-related stuff (including multiple reposts of dorkly comics) during 2014.
I feel that this is pretty typical of games coverage on the whole. "Sure, we'll post whatever we can find about pokemon games, even just fanart or whatever, but there's no way we want a feature on an upcoming indie game." When I hear that the biggest gaming publications in existence are saying "no, we won't talk about your game, or even mention your Kickstarter," this says, to me, "this is a problem."
I'm not a relic of anything. Have you read my NPD coverage? Or any other times I cite game sales data? Nearly all the time now, I include a lot more data than just NPD, and I'm constantly looking out for new sources of information (like SuperData, PwC, and comments from companies themselves). I've made a concerted effort to offer the broadest view of the market possible.
That said, if you have any specific details or insights to share about they way I've covered the economics of the industry, I'm all ears--I'm always looking to improve the way I write these stories.
Very little of this will give you PC figures, because digital distributors do not report their sales figures, most of the time. A good way to see where things are is to look at the quarterly financial reports of publishers by breakdown. We've seen a push towards Steamworks by many large publishers--Sega, for instance, actually went back and converted Company of Heroes to Steam, though they had no obligation to do so. Many games are removing GFWL, or engaging in better port practices, and their sales are growing. Several large publishers have indicated that the PC makes a great deal of their money--iirc, Ubisoft, Bethesda, and EA have all said things to this effect. For smaller games, read up on postmortems by their developers.
iOS, for instance, gets a TON of coverage. A TON. I believe it was fellow gaffer chubigans, who released his game Cook, Serve, Delicious on iOS, who said that he might as well have not wasted the time porting his game to mobile devices. It wasn't worthh the cost of the time it spent. He made most of his money on computers, specifically through Steam.
Even random, obscure iOS games (that are good!) get plenty of coverage.
I'm bothered about retro computer gaming is often ignored, I know this is often due to websites being understandably American centric but it's an important part of videogame history.
You see it most in discussions about the videogame crash that don't take into account the fact Europe wasn't as badly effected, or people pointing out that NES games were far more expensive than today's titles whilst ignoring something like the C64 budget range.
I gotta admit, I'd be bad at talking about retro computer gaming. My personal forte is from the mid-90s onward. But I wish more people talked about it.
Hard data tell us otherwise.
It could be argued that sales for specific titles tend to be higher on consoles (which isn't even a constant, by the way) but the amount of gaming software sold as a whole is an entirely different story.
You're right. What we tend to see is consoles selling more at launch, but PC games selling more in the long run. The money spent on PC gaming is ridiculously high, and growing.
Where did you get this from Starbreeze has never released the platform split only that 80% of the sales were digital. Anyway I agree that alot of it comes from the media only focusing on big release titles and ignoring medium to small titles. Maybe with the shift in indies on console it may make sites reevaluate how they cover games for pc. Unfortunately there is only so much time and web space so coverage will always be limited.
Spoke with someone who worked on the project about it.
What you're looking at is something approaching about 75% of all sales being on Steam, and 12-13% for both consoles. The PC SKU sold waaaay better, and basically saved the ompany.