2011 round-up: PC

From Dust was just one of many games delayed in a year that sorely tested PC gamers' patience.


Short Shrift

PC players are gaming's great investors. They outspend their console brethren on regular, iterative hardware upgrades, and put in the hours tweaking settings and downloading large files rather than popping to the shops and returning with a disc. In 2011, PC gamers' patience was stretched to limit with delay after delay to some of the year's biggest games.

Ubisoft was perhaps the worst culprit. Even putting to one side the publisher's regrettable DRM policy - which we'll be looking at in detail later this week - it delayed three PC releases in the space of a month. Along with Call Of Juarez, there was a month-long wait after the console release for Driver: San Francisco, and a three-week wait for From Dust. When Eric Chahi's god sim eventually launched, users found not only always-on DRM but a terrible, unoptimised port. Facing down a fan backlash, Ubisoft took the highly unusual step of offering refunds to the disgruntled, something EA would also offer to buyers of the dreadful Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12, which shipped without a host of promised features and was essentially a reskinned version of the free-to-play Tiger Woods Online.

Warner Bros delayed Batman: Arkham City - twice. The sickness spread to some of PC gaming's most revered developers, with Blizzard pushing Diablo III back to 2012 and Valve delaying the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta following feedback from pro players. Call Of Duty: Elite, the social, stat-tracking service that launched alongside Modern Warfare 3 on November 8, is still to launch on PC, despite Activision insisting that one of its employees "misspoke" in a tweet saying Elite might never reach PC at all.

It wasn't all bad, though. Sega made up for its silence on the protracted delay to Avalanche's top-down shooter Renegade Ops by adding Half-Life's Gordon Freeman as a playable character. Id Software eventually made the Doom 3 source code open-source as promised after John Carmack rewrote parts of the code that might have violated a patent. Earlier this month, Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment confirmed that its 2010 Xbox 360 game Alan Wake will be released for PC early next year - seven years after it was originally announced as a PC exclusive.

EA Origin

PC gamers have also had to put up with EA's jostle for increased market share following the launch of its Steam rival, EA Origin. In theory, competition benefits the consumer - and with one report claiming Valve controls 70 per cent of the PC gaming market, EA's intervention appears justified - but the launch of Origin didn't give players another choice: it gave them no choice at all.

First, the EA-published shooter Crysis 2 was removed from Steam, the company later blaming the removal on an exclusive DLC agreement developer Crytek had in place with Direct2Drive. Alice: Madness Returns was an Origin exclusive; so was The Old Republic. Gamers feared the worst when EA omitted Steam from the list of distributors of arguably the biggest PC game of the year, Battlefield 3, and those fears were later confirmed, with EA blaming Valve's "restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content."

EA has a point - Markus "Notch" Persson, head of Minecraft developer Mojang, admitted his game probably couldn't be released on Steam because the platform "limits a lot of what we're allowed to do with the game, and how we're allowed to talk to our users" - but it went about it in the wrong way, ramming the service down people's throats rather than making it an appealing proposition. By contrast, 2011 saw Valve release Portal 2 early on Steam after an expansive ARG, The Potato Sack, was completed. It made one of its most popular games, Team Fortress 2, free-to-play, and gave the Source engine SDK away for free as well. Gabe Newell took the high ground about the EA dispute, insisting Valve wanted the publisher's games on Steam, saying: "I think at the end of the day we're going to prove to Electronic Arts [that] they have happier customers, a higher-quality service, and will make more money if they have their titles on Steam. It's our duty to demonstrate that to them; we don't have a natural right to publish their games."

EA could learn much from Newell, and Valve. More than any other sector, success on PC is dependent on being engaged with your community, by listening and delivering what players want, rather than what you want them to have. Despite this, EA is ahead of the curve in its adaptation from traditional publishing to digital, something we'll be looking at in detail later this week.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/2011-round-pc