“ PC gaming’s future is also a story of its past and its present.

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FREE-TO-PLAY EXPLOSION

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MOVING TO THE LIVING ROOM

BOXED GAMES MARGINALIZED

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MORE CROWDFUNDING FREEDOM

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TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP

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“ Whatever the next-generation Xbox is, for example, I'd be very surprised if the specs are even as good as the PC I've got right now.

“It used to be people were asking, ‘Does PC gaming have a future?’ Now they are asking, ‘Is PC gaming the future?’ So says Todd Harris of Hi-Rez Studios, the company behind free-to-play shooter Tribes: Ascend. PlanetSide 2 and Tribes: Ascend , the arrival of killer MMO Guild Wars 2 and the announcement of The Elder Scrolls Online. There has been a host of fascinating PC indie games including Torchlight 2 Thirty Flights of Loving and Botanicula , as well as the flowering of innovation-enablers like Greenlight and Kickstarter. We’ve seen demos for a credible virtual reality headset and talk of new hardware innovations from Valve that will seek to bring PC gaming into the mainstream. And, of course, we’ve enjoyed traditional hardcore games like Far Cry 3 Dishonored and Diablo III that showed the PC at its very best.PC gaming’s future is also a story of its past and its present. It isn’t one of revolution, but of continued improvement. Obviously, technological innovation is always a factor for PC gamers, but we are also seeing changes wrought by distribution infrastructure, UI innovations, demographics, economics and shifting consumer expectations. Goings-on in the console, social and mobile markets ripple through PC gaming, often bringing new converts.What looks certain right now is that PC gaming has rarely enjoyed so much optimism. From the days when it seemed to be perishing under the weight of dismal casual and mainstream games, and from the coming of touch-screen devices and aggressive marketing from console-kings, the PC as a hardcore gaming device now looks as strong as ever.PC gaming is defined by change. How will things shape up in the next few years? We asked a few game developers for their views on ten different subjects.John Smedley has just released PlanetSide 2. He says the game will be Sony Online Entertainment’s most successful launch since EverQuest and the biggest F2P game yet. Not surprisingly, he’s confident about the future of this increasingly successful way of playing games.“Free-to-play games are the ultimate in capitalism,” he says. “Good stuff wins.”The next-generation consoles will undoubtedly offer F2P for some hardcore multiplayer titles, but they are at least a year away. This is an area where the PC is running riot. From the enormous success of titles like League of Legends right down to indie text adventures and social games, playing for no fee is becoming the standard. And we gamers really, really like playing for free.Todd Harris says, “There will be more free-to-play. It’s enabled by digital distribution and the developer working directly with the consumer. It enables a lot of interesting out-of-the-box models.”The good news is that gougy tactics that spoil the free versions games, by bullying players into paying for things they might not want, are being squeezed out by market-forces, especially in the hardcore market where players know better than to accept such shady practices. Games like PlanetSide 2 can afford to offer a rich free experience because they are reaping that 10 percent of paying consumers needed to justify the venture.For free-to-play to succeed it must continue to move away from cheap tactics and towards a more confident assertion of its paid-for offering. This, it should be stressed, is a process.John Smedley says, “You really have to listen to your community and rise to the occasion and make great games. I think that's even more of a capitalistic and democratized environment than retail games. Because if people don’t like what you’re offering, they’ll walk. If you’ve paid $60 for a game, you might play it even if you don’t much like it, but that won’t work with a free game.”Other models coming through include free games with ads. Square Enix's Core Online offers titles like Hitman: Blood Money for free, with players obliged to watch commercials. Producer Mads Wibroe says, "Paying $60 upfront for a full game is a huge commitment. Very few games can sell millions of copies at that level. And consumers at this point in time have a resistance to even very small payments like 99 cents because there’s tons of free content out there, because we all struggle with assessing the value of the experience we’re going to get and because of the hassles associated with making payments on the Internet. With ads, we get you started right away, let you enjoy the product, so long as you can suffer the occasional ad."In the great scheme of things, the number of people playing games like PlanetSide 2, compared to a hit like Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 , is still small. But the trends are pointing up. This year, Star Wars: The Old Republic adopted a free-to-play model, which ought to be seen not as a failure for the BioWare game, but as a success for free-to-play and for consumer choice.Todd Harris says, “It’s exciting for us because Tribes is known for being a hardcore game. It’s not necessarily a game for casual players. The fact that the model can be successful there is encouraging.”Right now, free-to-play is generally a multiplayer environment - campaigns are too expensive and difficult to monetize - but it’s certain that as the free-to-play base grows, so will the opportunity to create single-player campaigns that make use of this model.Received wisdom has it that the PC is a desktop device for playing alone, with social engagement happening online, while the console is for sprawling on the living room couch with pals. It was always a simplistic notion, but one rooted in a certain amount of truth. After all, if you were to imagine your dream entertainment-cave devoted to your own private pleasure, you might well place a luscious gaming rig slap-bang in the center, rather than a mere console and TV.But things are changing. For one, the notion of the PC as a mouse-keyboard-monitor device is becoming archaic, and although we are talking in this feature about PC gaming as it is generally understood by gamers, this idea cannot forever be partitioned from touch-screen tablet and mobile devices, any more than it can be partitioned from laptops.Change is coming from that most vigorous innovator, Valve. Just last week, company head Gabe Newell revealed plans to extend the company’s Big Picture TV interface and bring the PC closer to the TV. He told Kotaku , "Most customers and most developers will find that the PC is a better environment for them. They won't have to split the world into thinking about 'why are my friends in the living room, why are my video sources in the living room different from everyone else?' So in a sense we hopefully will unify those environments."Although the console is cheap, easy-to-install and modelled around mass-market consumer brands (traditionally, all areas of weakness for the games PC), games PCs do have advantages in the war for the living room. Newell said, “The nice thing about a PC is a lot of different people can try out different solutions, and customers can find the ones that work best for them."So PCs connected to TVs and central to the real-life social gaming is likely to become a norm. This is especially likely if consoles of the future are integrated into TVs and seek to aim themselves more squarely at the casual market, giving the PC an edge in the hardcore market (see Demographics below).Speaking recently at the Montreal Games Festival , Epic founder Tim Sweeney, one of the smartest people in gaming, expressed concern at the cost of making hardcore, visually stunning games for new platforms. “Budgets are always going to continue marching upwards," he said. "We are hoping costs at the start of the next generation to only be double the cost of the start of the previous generation."Traditional boxed games, massive brands like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, are very much tied to the fortunes of consoles. PC sales of these games make up only a tiny fraction of console sales. Gamers are very often required to petition for a PC release . With costs increasing, and the PC market fragmenting into free-to-play and smaller ‘indie’ games, the attraction for standard games publishers will probably further diminish.Nevertheless, the PC is and will continue to be the place where these games look the best and shine most brightly. This makes the PC a more attractive option for wealthier gamers, especially if the PC continues to outpace consoles in pure graphics processing terms over the next five years. Where consumers go, publishers follow.People like Sweeney are also building the tools to bring costs down and manage risk. One side-effect of this is for games to be released across as many platforms as possible. He said, “Epic will build games for PC, mobile and console. And any time we make something for one, we're going to explore how it fits on other platforms. We are going to be building a lot of multi-platform experiences."It’s likely that, just as in the console business, the number of boxed, $60 games tied to mass-market franchises will diminish, but that individually they will trend towards the high end of the quality scale. Brands like Elder Scrolls, Diablo, Borderlands and Far Cry will continue to grace the PC.Kickstarter isn’t a phenomenon restricted to PC gaming, but this is where it’s yielded energetic returns. From Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen to Double Fine Adventure to Faster Than Light, there have been dozens of PC projects offered up for public backing.The PC’s most striking advantage over other platforms is its openness. The same thing that attracts developers to crowd-funding, as opposed to publishers or venture-capitalists, is the freedom this model offers to write the games they want to create.For game developers like David Braben and Chris Roberts. it makes the most sense to use the PC. It’s a platform that allows for experimentation and, as with the likes of Minecraft , there is always a console-route if things go well. Steam’s Greenlight went live this summer. It allows consumers to decide which games make their way onto the online retail service. It provides opportunities for gamers to support their favorite projects.Undoubtedly, these new ways to fund and promote PC games will yield their disappointments. But free from the restrictions of an Apple or a Sony or a Nintendo, they create opportunities for real creative talent to offer up their ideas to an open-market.The PC has always been the best community for championing great ideas. Innovations like Kickstarter can only help its natural bent. It’s likely that crowdfunding communities will flourish and that individual developers will be able to address their audiences directly for advice on which games to make, and how they ought to be made. Kelly Zmak, president of MechWarrior Online publisher Infinite told IGN about the company’s efforts to grow the game through crowdfunding, “The MechWarrior audience has been a tremendous asset to us, both in defining what the product needs to be and also in helping us validate the assumptions we were going in with.”Tadhg Kelly, a veteran game developer and columnist for TechCrunch says that crowdsourcing is likely to be an attraction for those gamers who spend the most money, “Kickstarter enables the fan-to-developer relationship directly in a way that we haven't really seen before. That speaks to the people who have disposable income to engage in that relationship.”There will always be gamers who are not prepared to make-do with whatever fixed tech-specs console manufacturers decide upon. And so bigger, faster, brighter is a given in PC gaming’s future. As graphic technologies continue to improve, so lighting, texture resolution, particle physics, environmental effects, facial-emotive possibilities all improve.Chris Roberts, the creator of classic PC game series Wing Commander and now of Star Citizen , says, “The PC represents constant change and innovation. It doesn't stagnate. It's always challenging you. As someone that likes cool new stuff, I'm much more into it than a platform that's going to be the same for six or seven or 10 years. I like the fact that there's a more powerful video card every year, and maybe there's something new I can do that I couldn't have done last year. It's one of the reasons I focus on it.”Improvement is also true of console gaming, but not only has top-end PC gaming generally bested console performances, the gap between the two is likely to increase. The current consoles from Sony and Microsoft are now six or seven years old, and roughly equivalent to good PC gaming tech of around 2006. The next generation consoles will not offer better performance than the best PC games of 2013. In actual terms, the top-end PC is already a next-gen games machine, and is only going to get better, while consoles remain the same.At the same time, PCs and laptops that are entirely capable of running most games at very acceptable levels of performance are coming down in price. It used to be that a ‘games PC’ was a different beast than a PC used for college studies or business, but pretty much all PCs are now games PCs.John Smedley says, “There's a baseline where PCs can run all the big games. That number is getting relatively cheap. You're talking about thousand-dollar PCs that can run top-of-the-line games these days and that price point is coming down.”Todd Harris adds, “It’s a very big deal that someone buying their laptop for college can play the majority of new games that are released. That wasn’t always the case. There will always be people pushing the envelope and cranking up all the graphic fidelity, but the power of these integrated graphics cards is such that it can yield a gaming experience that’s pretty much equivalent to today’s consoles.”Tadhg Kelly believes that for most people playing PC games, technical performance is no longer an issue. “Is that difference really apparent anymore? Outside of somebody who's got really accurate vision or a super-high-def monitor or something like that, is that something that most people even realize? For most people, does it really matter?"Certainly, games developers have done an amazing job of pushing the available technology on current-gen console systems to the limit, pushing games like Halo 4 and Far Cry 3 to look as good as they can.It may be that the PC's technological advantage isn’t so much at the top-end - although there will be many people upgrading for the likes of Star Citizen - but in the middle where PC gaming on a low-cost machine is no longer about Minesweeper or Solitaire, but about graphically rich games that are often free-to-play. The Walking Dead game. He says, “I want to try and play the high-end games on the highest possible specs, so I've got a nice card in my PC rig.“For a while I took my PC downstairs and plugged into my TV and did the whole living-room gaming PC thing. Even though the games are running at the same resolution, because the TV is maxed out at 1080p, the level of texture detail and the amount of stuff that can happen on screen without slowing down, on a PC it’s noticeable. Whatever the next-generation Xbox is, for example, I'd be very surprised if the specs are even as good as the PC I've got right now. Nor should it be, really. The graphics card alone on my PC is more expensive, costs more at retail than the whole Xbox 720 will, or whatever they're going to call it.”