Crisis in PC Games World!

             A point of view by Richard Hewison

The average consumer might not even be aware of this, but the PC
games sector has been in trouble for a while now. A new release
need only sell between 3,000 - 5,000 copies in the UK to hit the
coveted No.1 spot in the weekly software charts.

The cause of this problem differs depending on who you speak to
within the industry. One possible cause is PC game demos.  Some
publishers are now of the opinion that game demos have been far
too generous over the last three or four years, especially since
CD-ROM muscled in. They believe that many people have picked up
the latest game demo from a magazine CD-ROM and have consequently
had many hours worth of entertainment out of them, to the point
when they haven't bothered to buy the final product. These
publishers now believe that slideshow or self-running demos are
the answer.

This is an argument I can understand, but not one that I agree
with. Reasons why people don't buy the full game after playing the
demo are numerous; the game could be crap, or it might need a more
powerful machine than the one the consumer currently owns (more on
this later!). You can probably trace these 'over generous' demos
down to the effect that the shareware version of "Doom" had on the
market back in 1993.  Because it was shareware, the authors (ID
software) gave away what was effectively one third of the game as
the demo. This immediately upped the stakes and other publishers
felt that they had to be just as generous with their own efforts.

One good example is the recent isometric RPG "Diablo", which has
had two different demos. The latter was officially known as the
'shareware' demo and allowed solo or multi-player action across
two levels. The random nature of dungeon generation and the
seeding of monsters within them did give this demo a fairly long
life. I played it for ages and was on the verge of buying the full
game when I read various reviews (including those in SynTax) which
complained that there was little variety in the full game and that

there were only fourteen or so levels. The demo probably offered
only fractionally less entertainment than the full game!

The next argument is one I do agree with. A large percentage of
the PC games buying public still own fairly low specification
machines (which by today's standards are probably Pentium P90s).
Undeterred by this, the publishers continue to churn out games
which need a top of the range PC to run on (today - a P166 or
above, tomorrow a 300 MHz Pentium II!). The developers do have a
problem - games take a good 18 months to develop so they have to
try and future proof the games somehow. Unfortunately, they've
been overestimating the average future specification for years!
Developers also love nothing better than to play with the latest,
fastest and flashiest hardware on the market. It makes their games
look great - shame about the gameplay though.

Only two recent examples have managed to beat the above scenario.
Core Design's "Tomb Raider" and Bullfrog's "Dungeon Keeper" both
run on low end PCs (DX4s and above). Both have been critically
successful, and we all know how well "Tomb Raider" did in the
shops.  Time will tell if "Dungeon Keeper" manages to sell as
many.

The next possible reason for low PC sales is the type of games
being published. A large percentage of new PC games these days are
conversions of PlayStation titles. This leads back to the previous
possible cause; these games need some serious PC hardware to run
well.  For example, "Wipeout XL" and "Formula 1" from Psygnosis
both require 3D accelerated graphic cards on the PC. There is
another issue - PC owners who are into those types of game
probably already own a PlayStation console (due to the console
itself being relatively cheap to buy).

The last reason currently doing the rounds is putting the blame on
the sheer number of software titles being published. I hadn't had
a good look around a software shop for a while and was stunned by
the amount of games on the shelves, especially when I hadn't heard
of half of them. Looking at the boxes and reading the blurb on the
back only made me wonder why half of them had ever got off the
designer's note pad! Do we really want yet another "Doom" clone,
or yet another platform game? Who cares if the graphics were all
rendered in 16,000 colours - you still just have to move left,
right and press fire to shoot or jump, don't you? The enormous
lack of variety or originality is very worrying. Publishers stick
to the tried and tested game genres but try and compensate with
more and more of the 'eye candy' or throw in lots of blood or go
the opposite way and throw in loads of 'cute' characters instead.
With PC game sales nose diving, we (the consumer) are obviously
not being fooled by any of this.

So what is the answer? I'm not sure. The games market wants to be
as big as the music industry, but there's no way it can be with so
many different formats to publish on (PSX, Saturn, N64, Mac, PC -
and then all the different spec PCs within that arena). The price
of software is also still too far away from the 'impulse' purchase
price that music CDs have.  The RRP for most new PC games is
still œ35 or more, although most shops instantly discount them
to œ29.99 from day one. Not until new releases are down to œ15
will the PC games market become what it desperately wants to be.
Unfortunately, the cost of developing a CD-ROM game today means
this is unlikely to ever happen. A bit of a 'chicken and egg'
situation. One thing is for sure - quality needs to rise above
quantity. If that means a whole load of publishers go bust then so
be it. They can go back to whatever they were doing before they
decided to give games publishing a go. Give the creativity back to
the coders who started the whole industry off sixteen years ago
and maybe we won't be asking the same questions in the new
Millennium ... but I doubt it.











                              - o -