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Epic's Bleszinski: PC Game Market In 'Disarray'
by David Jenkins

5 comments

February 14, 2008

Epic's Bleszinski: PC Game Market In 'Disarray'

A new interview with Epic Games’ Cliff Bleszinski (aka CliffyB) suggests that the Gears of War developer may focus its development efforts on consoles rather than the PC in the future, with Bleszinski describing the PC market as in “disarray”.

Speaking to Stephen Totilo of consumer website MTV Multiplayer, Bleszinski commented: “I think people would rather make a game that sells 4.5 million copies than a million and Gears is at 4.5 million right now on the 360.”

“I think the PC is just in disarray,” he stated. “What’s driving the PC right now is Sims-type games and World of WarCraft and a lot of stuff that’s in a Web-based interface. You just click on it and play it. That’s the direction PC is evolving into so for me, the PC is kind of the secondary part of what we’re doing. It’s important for us, but right now making AAA games on consoles is where we’re at.”

Although Epic has denied any major disappointment with sales of the PC versions of Gears of War and Unreal Tournament III neither game made a major impact on sales charts in the manner enjoyed by most of the company’s other console based titles.

Regarding the company’s target audience Bleszinski commented: “I don’t want to win over their little college sister, because that’s not the kind of game I do. I’m not going to make Zack & Wiki. I’m not going to make f—ing Cooking Mama. But that’s okay.”

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Comments

Benjamin Quintero

14 Feb 2008 at 8:30 am PST

...sigh... Epic has shifted to consoles. id has shifted as well. I'm not sure if CliffyB is 100% right about his assessment but it sure paints a grim picture for PC games. So is this the end of hardcore PC games? Are the PC gamers doomed to playing point-click farming games and mystery novel adventures? Hopefully the smaller, independent developers that are unable to spend 10's of thousands of dollars on development hardware and software (+millions to actually develop on it) will still keep PC's alive for hardcore gamers. Hard to say if they can keep up with the bar set by the big wigs like Epic and id =(...

Roger Pumfrey

14 Feb 2008 at 11:25 am PST

While I won't deny that console sales are huge, Bleszinski's assessment of the PC market and its direction is laughable. He easily forgets that Gears of War was a monstrous success because it was one of the only next-gen offerings on Xbox 360 at its release. That landscape is changing quickly even for a studio like Epic.

Jeff Hamilton

14 Feb 2008 at 12:03 pm PST

The lower price point of consoles compared to their increasingly competent processing capabilities has certainly been a large factor in the dwindling PC games market, but NPD data is not really an accurate measure of the success of the PC platform. Given that it neither incorporates digital distribution sales nor online subscriptions, the money in the PC market is much much greater than NPD makes it out to be.

Scott Macmillan

14 Feb 2008 at 5:03 pm PST

I wish we could tell how many of the PC sales for Epic were cannibalized by their coming out first on the consoles.

My $.02 - I think it's more likely that the hardcore gamer is happy and at home on the 360 right now for the most part, and that's why we see this drop in AAA PC sales... since mostly the AAA PC games are simply year-old ports of games that came out for consoles first.

Anonymous

14 Feb 2008 at 8:36 pm PST

Anybody who wants to drive something to be one thing instead of a diverse ecosystem strikes me as narrow-minded at best. When things are "in disarray" is usually a time when there is much more excitement and creativity. Maybe Cliffy B can't stand that PC gamers are going off and trying out things other than first-person shooters, and he doesn't get all the glory from them anymore? Okay, go off and do the console thing then. It's more like fast-food version of gamedev, anyway.