BioWare: Chill Till The Next Episode
BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka told CVG recently that the renowned company will be offering episodic content for all of its upcoming games, including Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Jade Empire: Special Edition. Muzyka spoke directly to the future of the PC gaming market - often the strong, silent sibling among the more ebullient and quarrelsome console triplets - and, as BioWare has more than a few kick-ass PC games under its belt, Muzyka is a good man to do the talking.
"The videogame market is very cyclical and PC and console gaming have an uneasy alliance - as new console systems are released, early adopter fans move over to check those games out and as PC systems reach and surpass console systems at the end of a console life cycle, a good number of those early adopter fans move back over to PC gaming. Console gaming is huge of course, especially when you add in hardware sales, but it's hard to quantify the enormous impact of online gaming on the overall PC market - retail sales just don't capture the revenues from the increasingly successful PC MMOs as well as digital distribution and episodic gaming (which are both gaining strength year after year)."
Hit the jump for more.
To be fair, we're seeing a content-distribution evolution across the board: XBLA is the exemplar of an easy, accessible, friendly (and totally new) method of distributing games and game content, selling media from TV to film and back again. And with MMOs taking some of the profit glory away from the traditional cashbox register, the PC gaming industry must know that they've got some work to do to stay competitive.
Only without a standardized framework (I'm looking at you, Live Anywhere) already set in place to carry content down the pipeline and bring money back up, studios and developers are making these decisions - and implementing them - by themselves. Which is a bit of a mixed bag, as you'd expect.
Muzyka points out that the strengths of PC gaming lie in its enormous installed user-base, even though not everyone with a computer plays games, and in the PC's constantly-evolving hardware and software environments. Also a drawback, of course, in terms of compatibility, but nevertheless adaptable and upgradeable. Possibly even more significant is the PC's primacy when it comes to internet connectivity and usability: a dedicated DSL or cable connection running straight to your computer means quick access to game updates and support (which many BioWare games have featured for a while now, as well as those from other studios) as well as an easy way to sell and deliver new content to PC gamers.
Of course, until I know exactly what kind of "episodic content" we're talking about, my credit cards are staying right where they are. If it's another empty $3 wizard's tower that I have to activate manually over the telephone (yeah, Bethesda, that totally sucked, sorry), I'll be Out Fishin'.
CEO Ray Muzyka and president Greg Zeschuk discuss the PC gaming scene, its recent developments and where it's heading [CVG]
[Via: SlashDot]
tiny dancer
Posted to Video Games on 22 January 2007
Other stuff like this: bioware, dragon age, jade empire, mass effect, pc
