I'm still waiting for an analyst to come out and say "I predict things will be pretty much the same way they are right now" ;P. Of course - he'd probably lose his job afterwards...

With answering "what do people want ?" as difficult as it is, trying to predict what people will want IN THE FUTURE seems nigh impossible. That's why I love the approach guys at Blizzard take - they ask themselves "Since we're gamers - what do WE want to play ?"... and then release the appropriate game 5-10 years later xD.

I think the common sense thing is to say free-2-play and all that jazz will be important and big in the future. That doesn't mean singleplayer pay up-front product won't continue to thrive though, which is where he sounds like an idiot.

He's been whining non-stop about Crysis "only" selling 2 million copies for years now and finding every single reason it was everyone's fault but his own.

:)
Nailed it twice.

In other news, Ken Levine just made himself my hero... AGAIN!

http://kotaku.com/5675559/the-future-of-pc-gaming-according-to-the-lead-creator-of-bioshock

See, now there's a man who knows what he's talking about. I might just have to get Bioshock Infinite after all.. ;)

Finally a person in the games industry who sees the clear picture. Well said, that man!

He's just paying lip service to the platform that hasnt been the main focus on "AAA" game titles for a long time now. Mass effect, call of duty, halo, PC . Mac in the case of Halo, yeah, before hitting the big leagues, then they went console only. Big ideas, yes. Don't every seasoned game industry guy say that tired saying "Ideas are a dime a dozen, build a prototype or GTFO." Prototyping isnt cheap. Meanwhile his team at Irrational is playtesting Bioshock Infinite with a 360 controller. Will Irrational make a PC focused game in the future? Fuck if I know. Oh wait, i do know. NO.

And he forgot to mention "but I won't be involved in any of that innovation". Let the Braids and Minecrafts innovate, while he'll be busy making the next multi million dollar big AAA made for console release.

Eh, I think Bioshock was a pretty great PC version. 2K as well seems to understand the platform pretty well. Not sure where your argument is.

It's not like there is no innovation on consoles, there is just more on the PC. BioShock, despite mostly being System Shock again, still innovated with setting, story and plasmids. Who knows what Infinite will do, but I bet it will be a good game.

And who wants everything to be Minecraft anyway? I don't. I'm glad there are people making big-budget shooters and I am glad there are people making small indie innovations. There is plenty of room for both, especially when those big-budget shooters are well ported to the PC like BioShock was.

No, the dude's right. PCs are multi-purpose tools that can - and therefore will - be used for gaming.

There's an article praising the virtues of consoles written by a Russian sellout blogger. He had to do some serious ass-pulling of numbers to have the consoles come out ahead. "Everyone has a hueg tv, so the only thing you have to buy for console gaming is a console. On the other hand, if you want to play a PC game right now, you need a brand new PC with two gfx cards, a 2560x100000000 monitor because why settle for less and Windows 9 2/3 Awesometastic Edition among other things. Wow, that's a lot of money. PC gaming totally sucks." Eww.

People use PCs at work. The initial cost of taking up PC gaming is literally zero. On the flipside, I don't have a TV, neither do my two best friends; my parents have three with a resolution of... wait for it... 320x240. But even if we did have one or just used the PC monitor, the initial cost of console gaming is the price of the console.

Now, the line is actually blurring. It's possible to install Linux and run apps on a Nintendo DS of all things, not to mention other consoles. It's just people who make devices from start to finish (consoles, phones, Macs) get away for much more dickery than is acceptable for someone dealing in PC-ware. Not for long, though.

Note how every mobile device in existence got absorbed by the "phone". The PC, being already multi-purpose, will evolve into a Clever Home. The NAS will be quietly running and distributing content around the house and on the web, a specialized processing unit (PC? Mac? Ecksbawks? who cares?) will fire up and perform hardcore calculations when needed, a smaller energy-saving device will keep track of the facilities, do things around the house and report your activities to the almighty Google. Printers, screens, tablets, speakers, i dunno, perfume sprayers (which at some point are going to be remotely hacked to spray poison to murder the owner) - everything will be connected to the local network.

Then, bam, advances in data compression and transfer allow for an explosion of cloud computing and storage, only input and output devices and some sort of ID are needed, everyone's on the matrix (except perhaps Jason Scott, because he dislikes clouds).

That's how I see it. I'm probably wrong.

Interesting... 4 weeks ago I was standing in line to buy a Crysis+Crysis:Warhead bundle with the display case in my hand and my credit card ready when I noticed that it required an Internet connection to play. There's no way I'm willing to go through that kind of hassle and uncertainty anymore so I put the box back and left.

Upon doing further research it appears that Warhead has not only DRM but also a 5 install limit. From what I can tell Crysis is nothing worse than an annoying CD check.

But that's just me. Putting aside my purely anecdotal counterexample to Cevat's hypothesis, Crysis probably suffered in sales mostly due to the reputation it earned for being "that game that your PC isn't good enough to run".

Exactly how/why I got into it.

Yes, that was a big part of it. Which is a shame because the game scaled well for lower systems, but the reputation was there for it being a huge resource hog.

It's pretty rude of people who're happy with the way the industry is headed these days to basically just twist around the arguments of anyone who disagrees into something completely nonsensical.

When someone says something like "Mainstream developers don't innovate anymore and just try to copy whatever ha proven successful." The response is often something along the lines of, "Well gosh, I don't see what's wrong with there being big budget mainstream games that aren't just like (insert indie title)."

See what was done there is that the defender twisted around the statement from "We hardly have anything." To, "We want everything! And nothing for you!" Seriously, where does that come from?