I'm in a great deal of pain. I'm bored. I want to go to the doctor but can't afford it--can't even afford to miss the solitary hour of work I'm scheduled for today. This is my personal therapy/distraction for the day.
Consoles bore me. I haven't touched my PS3 in six months, and my 360 hasn't fared a whole lot better. When my LIVE sub runs out, it's not being renewed. Sure, I'm mildly interested in an Xbox One, because of Remedy/Insomniac/Turn10/Playground stuff that's coming out, and a PS4, because of Infamous, but even if I was in a position where buying new consoles was easy, I'm not sure I'd go right out and do it.
Gaming, for me, is all about computer gaming. It's way more cost-effective. It's got way more exclusives. It's got a significantly broader variety of games, the best versions of these games, an amazing amount of interface options, customizability, free online, everything.
Computer gaming is straight-up awesome, in every respect.
Like most people, I tend to visit large multiplatform gaming websites quite a bit. They've got interviews, features, and stuff that's largely relevant to my interests, but the one area they tend to ignore is computer gaming. Last year, most sites completely ignored Shadow Warrior, which was easily one of the best-written games we've had in years. One of the few reviews said that the very mouse-oriented game was "better with a controller." Dragon Commander, which Durante called "...the most entertaining PC-ass PC game..." fared even more poorly.
These were awesome, entertaining, and fun games, and yet, they were pretty much ignored. One major gaming website's only articles on Shadow Warrior are for marketing trailers released. Coverage of Dragon Commander consists of an article mentioning the announcement of the game, and a video of some staff playing the game.
I've spoken with indie devs who've talked about how some of these big sites pretty much ignore them. One told me that a major gaming website flat-out told them "no, we won't cover you." I've pitched an article to an editor I greatly admire, and he turned an article down because "we've covered the game before." The coverage? A single article mentioning the game's Kickstarter. Much love to the guy; I think he's one of the best in the biz, and I'd pretty much kill to work for him, even at minimum wage, but in that one area, I found myself a bit disappointed.
It's not to say this kind of stuff always happens. That guy who got rejected for ANY kind of coverage? Kotaku picked up his game, giving him an outlet, so good on them for that.
For fun, I looked up the posting history of a gaming journalist. This person had posted about 31 articles regarding one IP, nearly a dozen regarding another, reposted lots of content from Dorkly, and had covered other topics half a dozen or so times. I believe an Oculus Rift port of a classic console game had two or three articles alone, not counting other articles on the franchise, which hasn't had a major release recently.
I see this kind of thing a lot. Plenty of articles on these sites seem like excuses to tweet about nostalgia, or a series someone likes. Playing Animal Crossing right now? Sure, here's about two posts a day, every day, for ANYTHING Animal Crossing. Plushies, fan art, you name it, let's talk about Animal Crossing however we can. But oh, well, we've posted the ads when they showed up, so we've done our due diligence. Don't need to review it or anything. Don't have the manpower. Gotta keep posting those barely-read Animal Crossing articles.
Okay, I sound a little bitter. Sorry.
To a degree, I get it. Consoles have larger audiences (never mind that PC-specific sites like RPS and PC Gamer get millions of hits, and PC Gamer's one of the few gaming magazines still in print, when plenty of console-focused articles have failed). Most gaming journalists are Mac users, which is why any PC nostalgia they have seems to be limited to games that showed up on Macs, like old-school Lucasarts Adventure titles. Quite a few of them simply don't play PC games. I know, I've talked to them. Heck, I've convinced one to buy a PC gaming rig, and doing so ended up convincing his boss. I gave both of them some advice on building these things.
But it completely bothers me that people running big gaming websites which are ostensibly about covering all games don't even play PC games, or do so rarely.
The creator of Thomas Was Alone, Mike Bithell, said he felt as though PC exclusives got a degree of 'legitimacy' when they went to consoles, but I think he's got it a bit wrong. It's not so much consumers, it's press. We're not seeing consumers go "oh, because of this news article that a game is coming to consoles, I am going to buy this game," we're seeing journalists go "oh, this game is important now that it's coming to consoles, I'll write about it," people are becoming aware of the game, and then they're going out and buying it. The issue isn't with consumers, I think, so much as it is with the gaming press.
Consider this: computer exclusive games tend to get lower press scores compared to their audience reception, unless they're known IPs (eg Diablo). After a computer-exclusive game gets released, you'll find a lot of people just completely falling in love with these games... which end up getting something in the 70s on metacritic, if they're reviewed at all. When they are reviewed, it seems that people rarely give them the attention they deserve--several major sites, for instance, completely ignored major problems with SimCity, a 'known' game IP that many of them had played earlier iterations of, presumably because they didn't spend much time with the game. On the flip side, a game like Shadow Warrior had its wonderful tragic narrative and deep gunplay ignored because it had fun with wang jokes. Obvious, but not really the meat of the games.
Games writers will talk about console, even mobile games that deserve our affections, that were unfairly ignored, but when the computer games get involved, it's like "nah, hey, let's just pretend this isn't a thing." I've seen some of these major sites dedicate a lot more time to random non-gaming stuff than computer games.
"We don't have the manpower to cover everything" seems solved by maybe spending a bit less time browsing various aggregators to repost someone's amusing Pokemon picture. Heck, it took me about two days to get through Shadow Warrior, and a couple articles to write a review
that has encouraged a surprising number of people to go buy the game, so I feel great about that
"Computer games don't sell as much." HAHAHAHA, that's not even true. Most multiplatform PC games, for instance, sell as much as their console SKUs. Some, like Dragon Age: Origins and Payday 2, both the best-selling games their respective developers had ever released, performed waaaaay better on computers than the consoles. Imagine a games website that only ever talked about Nintendo and the Xbox One, occasionally going "oh, right, yeah, a PS4 game is coming out, here's a trailer," and left it at that. When computer games are on par with or sell better than console SKUs, it seems like they deserve equal attention.
There are other factors as well. Computer gaming doesn't have any organized PR. The company that does the most for it is Valve, which, due to its unique management structure, doesn't seem to have the kind of PR department that first-parties have. Plus, they seem way more focused on developers. I can totally see how, without advocacy, PC gaming can fall by the wayside.
PC gaming, until 2008 or so, was pretty difficult to get into, but that's changed quite a bit. It's easy, cost-effective, and has the most (and best) games. For a while, the industry (mistakenly) believed that PC gaming was dying--no real reason to invest in it.
Additionally... it kinda seems like the people who actually grew up liking PC games didn't go into journalism, or, if they did, didn't stay long. Heck, the EIC of RPS, Jim Rossignol, hasn't been around much lately, as I understand it, because he's working a game. Kieron Gillen left RPS to go work on comics. Tom Francis released Gunpoint and retired from journalism. Guys like Shawn Elliott and Jeff Green have/had jobs in the industry. Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek, the greatest gaming writers of all time, are now best known for writing Portal.
I've also noticed a difference between these guys and a lot of the current gaming press. Most of these guys got their industry jobs/made their own games/etc in part because they all displayed an understanding of how games worked. It's not really surprising that I value their writing on games way more than the kind of people who occasionally take a break from posting a wild theory about how the Pixar universe is all connected to say some shallow thing about games. Right now, a great deal of games writers seem to spend more time on nostalgia (it's a pretty common theme in articles they write), with a few shallow critiques that would make writers in other disciplines cringe. They come to games writing as fans, often with heavy console gaming backgrounds, where the best writers seem to be people who come to games writing as enthusiasts, almost always with a significant grounding in PC gaming. Many of the latter end up making it into the industry.
Don't get me wrong. There are some people, like Matt Leone and Jason Schreier, who do these incredible long-form games writing, demonstrating that they are absolutely fantastic journalists. I'd love to be even a tenth as good as they are.
I follow a pretty diverse group of people on twitter. Within gaming circles, though, I've noticed something. The people with all the nostalgia for computer games? Developers. Whenever No One Lives Forever shows up in my Twitter feed, it's almost entirely because of someone like Nels Anderson, Clint Hocking, Steve Gaynor, David Pittman, or Anthony Burch. The people with the nostalgia for console gaming, on the other hand? Current journalists.
So.
Yeah.
I'm not saying "hey, you, I know you don't enjoy computer games, but you HAVE to talk about them." You like what you like, and I'm not going to keep you from that. But... y'know, if you can, at least hire someone who does like 'em. If you don't feel like using your voice to talk about computer games, find someone who does.
Heck, I'd do it for like... $10k a year. It's below the poverty line, but I already am, so what do I care?
PC games. They tend to get ignored. What journalists do write about them tend to move on to the business, which is sad, because they're often the journalists who seem to understand games beyond nostalgia and presentation.
I wish more people would write about computer games. I wish people would talk about Tropico 5 just as much as the next random console exclusive that will probably manage to eke out a mid-80s on metacritic and generally see a gigantic price drop 'cause nobody liked it. I'm doing what I can, but... well, I'm an occasional freelancer.
Get the voices out there, gaming press. Somehow. Talk about it more. Quite a few of us actually care.
