And besides, do we REALLY want Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo controlling nearly every damn commercial video game published out there?. Sure… it’s got benefits but talk about monopolies… and censorship… and off-the-wall advertising…

I might almost argue the other way. Unless, and here’s the big but, it’s something really big. Something like this that worked and was really to use and included with computers out of the box.

Barring something that just takes the entire PC industry, not just the PC Gaming industry, by storm, there isn’t going to be anything to save the PC Gaming industry except developers themselves. They need to start being smart about development, start really paying attention to what requirements do to the install based of their game, to releasing stuff that “just works” (console style) instead of releasing products that require six patches and so on to be finally working.

I’ll go into this more in part two, but the savior of the PC Gaming industry, assuming such a thing does or will exist, will be the developers/publishers, no one else.

What is happening with PC games is really no different than what happened with the game crash of the late 80’s and early 90’s.

What the PC industry lacks is innovation. Not only in technological advances, but coding/software as well. How much longer do PC users have to suffer from the processor/bus/memory/peripheral mess that has been the standard architecture of PC’s since day one? One look at Sony’s Cell chips should be enough to answer that question. PC’s are a slave to their own format, and one that hasnt changed but ever so slightly since their inception. There is only so much innovation that can occur on a platform that refuses to evolve.

Look to Carmack and crew and what they did with Quake1/2 and OpenGL where hardware rendering is concerned. How freaking cool was it to get a new Voodoo card and play those games with hardware rendering for the first time?

It was beyond cool.

But look at the innovation of those days when compared to advances made recently- there is none. Since hardware rendering was adopted, the only innovation has been focused on increased poly counts, texture resolution, and lighting, which has left innovative game design to suffer as a result.

One thing that I am certain of though; is that all of the Richard Bartle’ and Nick Yee’, and all of the game developer conferences, pundit speak, or gaming universities arent going to change the face of PC gaming. The PC, itself, has to change/evolve first.