PC Game Fun Time

The latest news is — if you can believe it — that Fallout 3 has already made $300 million in sales across all platforms. That’s way better than most movies can even pretend to aspire to. And according to our resident Fallout expert, the returns are deserved, as it’s a really good game.

I also find it kind of hard to fault Bethesda Software in deciding to dumb down Fallout somewhat in order to bring it to consoles. They wouldn’t have come close to $300 million in sales without selling those millions of copies for the console. We’re definitely seeing a trend here that has gone from emerging to mainstream: expect pretty much all AAA PC game titles to be released on gaming consoles as well from here on out. After publishers made such a killing on Bioshock, Far Cry 2, and now Fallout 3, there’s no way to financially justify to their shareholders the release of a PC-exclusive game these days. There may be a few remaining exceptions (such as Blizzard), but even they will “see the light” eventually. Heck, even Id Software is developing for consoles now.

Much has been made about Blizzard’s recent announcement that StarCraft 2 will be released as a trilogy. For those who don’t know, the basic story is that the initial release of the game will include the multi-player portion of the game, and the campaign for the Terran side, one of three sides (Terran, Zerg and Protoss) featured in the game.

This has generated a lot of controversy online, with people unhappy about having to pay for three games. While I understand where they are coming from, I also think this move on Blizzard’s part can make a good deal of sense from both a business and a gaming point of view. I’m going to try to explain this below as best I can.

To start off, we need to consider Blizzard as a company. Here’s how I see Blizzard: as a high-quality creator of commercial games. You can’t argue that World of Warcraft is a polished product (I’m sure there are rough edges, don’t get me wrong. But the average person doesn’t see those the first time through.), you can’t argue that StarCraft, Warcraft III, or Diablo II weren’t polished products. Blizzard is the James Patterson or Robert Ludlum of the gaming industry: they are dedicated to the craft of creating tight, vivid, readable (playable, in Blizzard’s case) titles. You can never tell me that Patterson has a dedication to literary craft. You can never tell me that Blizzard has a dedication to a deep or, well, complicated gaming experience. Blizzard makes games to get the widest following possible so they can make the most money possible. Nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s just the kind of games they choose to make.

As for my favorite game companies over the years, Cavedog, Black Isle, Warren Spector’s ION Storm Austin, Irrational Games, and Stardock, I see them as creators of interesting games. Total Annihilation wasn’t and isn’t the most polished game in existence (although it tightened up considerably from the original 1.0 to 3.1). Neither is Deus Ex, Freedom Force, Galactic Civilizations II, or five or ten of my other favorites that I could name. But here’s the key with all these games: Depth. Total Annihilation is, to me, almost infinitely replayable to me even in unmodded form, because of how many different ways there are to play it. Deus Ex is mind-blowingly deep for its era when you consider how many different ways you can play it. Same for Fallout and Freedom Force. These are not games that will truly appeal to a wide cross section of the gaming and non-gaming populace.

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