Issues with PC Games

The boys at Penny Arcade linked to this article at JoeUser.com in which the author (presumably Brad Wardell of Stardock Software) talks about how he had some bad experiences with publishing games, how Stardock has dealt with that, and what he sees as problems with the "traditional" PC game publishing model:

And PC games have a perfect storm of bad habits:

• First, I am expected to devote hundreds of megabytes to them. Okay, I can live with that.


• But then they expect me to keep the CD in the drive.


• And then I usually have to keep track of a little tiny paper serial number (usually taped to the back of the CD jacket).


• And all that so that I can play a game that needs a couple of patches to play.

Tell me about it. I have bought more than one game for the PC where the first patch was available for download before the game even hit store shelves. A good example of this is Tribes 2. The game rocks, don't get me wrong, but I bought it knowing that the first thing I would do is download the patch. Now, when I buy a new game, the first thing I do after installing it is to check the publisher's website for a patch. More often than not there's already a patch available, or one shows up within two weeks. Game companies are so schedule driven that they ship the game with known bugs, deferring the fixes to the patch, just so they can make their date. Not all companies do this. Probably the most well-known recent example is Half-Life 2 from Valve which was delayed several months, and then was delayed even longer (looks like it'll be about a year) when someone hacked into their network and stole a good chunk of the code. Valve is rewriting good portions of the code to prevent people from hacking the game and cheating while playing online.

Console game publishers don't have this luxury. They have to get it right the first time because it's more difficult to put out an update. Consoles that have hard drives (such as the XBox) make it easier but, even then, not everyone is online and patches would have to be distributed via CD. There are examples of console games that ship with major bugs, but it's much less common and the bugs are not known before shipping.

My PC gaming experience has been mostly positive. Fortunately, I can afford a beefy machine to run the games well, and don't have to worry about disk space. DSL allows me to download even multi-hundred megabyte patches with no problem. A high-end video card and monitor allow me to run at a considerably higher resolution than is possible with a console and television. Being installed onto big hard drives allows PC games to have more flexibility and features, although I'm starting to see more games that use a console-style save game system (i.e. you have checkpoints that you can save rather than being able to save at just any time). Halo for PC is like that, but it's a port of a console game so no problem. XIII is also like that, but that's probably due to it being released for both PC and consoles at the same time.

Still, PC games are at risk, as the author of the article says. I personally hate having to have the CD in the drive when playing various games. I have two CD drives right now and am contemplating adding a third just so I don't have to swap discs as often. Hopefully Stardock's example will serve to inspire other game publishers to do away with onerous copy protection that doesn't do any good anyway since it's always cracked within days.