http://www.gamesradar.com/why-next-...-nothing-but-a-reason-to-switch-to-PC-gaming/
PC gaming by comparison to console gaming is the slightly scummy all-night bar with the cool jukebox next door. Yeah, the paintwork is peeling a bit and the toilets don’t always flush like they should, but more interesting people hang out there, the conversation is interesting, and no-one is too bothered about anyone’s appearance or social status as long as they’re having a good time. Oh, and there’s no door charge.
The various consoles’ downloadable game services were meant to level the playing field. They were meant to be the saviours of more experimental and lower budget indie development on the big HD machines. They were supposed to turn console gaming into a truly democratic, healthy and varied experience by opening up an outlet for the kind of games that just couldn’t find a market in an age dominated by big retail blockbusters. And for a while they did.
But now? Nintendo’s online stores are an organisational and marketing shambles. The PSN is still has a steady trickle of interesting exclusives but what does Xbox Live Arcade give us these days? Three or four decent downloadable games a year, increasingly tied to big franchises or publishers, and almost certainly tied into some Microsoft-branded promotion. The rest are left to die. Indie devs are giving up on the Xbox 360 in droves, repeatedly citing too much control and too little support from Microsoft as the reasons. The freer (though frequently crap-filled) XBL Indie Games marketplace has been buried deep by the new dashboard update. The “triple-A or GTFO” model remains the same. Only the delivery method and file sizes have changed.
By nature of being an open platform, though, the PC has the full spectrum of gaming, covering every level of budget, profile, genre and beardy-weirdy artiness. There are no publishing gate-keepers. It’s just you and your audience, and handily your audience are pretty much all connected to the internet. Whether you use a distribution network like Steam or not, getting your game out there is cheaper and easier than on consoles by far. So creativity and ambition of every size and shape can flourish.
In complete agreement except for the final statement.As much as we gamers moan about the increasing homogenisation of mainstream games, we never acknowledge that the problem is utterly exacerbated on consoles. We ignore the fact that the development freedom that we say we want is happening every day on the PC. We rightly champion the odd console release like Braid or Limbo as a mighty strike for creativity, but there's a raft of stuff in that vein happening all over the PC every day, along with more new IP than you can keep up with. We complain, but we rarely make the leap away from the systems and structures that cause the problems we lambast.
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