Bungie's reveal: a disservice to Destiny

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 05:38 (4295 days ago) @ GauntMkII

That's the quote, but it's the sentence before that that caused the backlash:

We limited players to two weapons, we gave them recharging health, we automatically saved and restored the game -- almost heretical things to first-person shooters at the time. We made the game run without a mouse and keyboard. And now nobody plays shooters the way they used to play them before Halo 'cause nobody wants to.

The interpretation many people and some blogs have of this is that he's saying "no-one plays shooters with keyboard and mouse anymore, because halo rendered that obsolete", which is obviously not the case. We all know it wasn't what he meant, but you know the internet...

Well, think about it this way. FPS games used to be a minority on consoles. About the only one prior to Halo that seems to have been well thought of was Goldeneye. Consoles were thought of as best for fighting games and platformers, not for shooters-- and for JRPGs but not so-called "Western" RPGs.

So FPS players on consoles have gone, over the decade that spans the Halo franchise, from being a very small minority to being a majority. The argument is about how much of a majority. Take a look at RockPaperShotgun, a site I enjoy reading even though I do more gaming on consoles since Halo, because they do good coverage of games that just happen to come out on PCs and consoles. But their raison d'etre is the PC platform, and how developers and publishers ignore it (or even sleight it) at their peril, and how the failure of crossplatform titles is the fault of developers who make crappy ports, and how piracy isn't relevant.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/18/mouse-keyboard-still-a-major-player-in-fps-market/

This article bends over backwards and pulls numbers right out of the author's nether parts to prove that Jones' vague generalization-- that shooters are not like they were ten years ago, for these specific reasons-- and turn it into an unjustified slight on the presumed legions of mouse and keyboard players.

He starts off with the huge disparity in NPD sales figures between Black Ops on consoles and on PC. Apparently in its first month, that title sold 8 million on Xbox 360 and PS3 combined, and a paltry 400,000 on PC.

And then come the buts. Only includes the US (only includes the US for both console and PC, like all NPD figures). Unreported digital sales. Piracy. (Why developers and publishers are supposed to give a damn about the mouse and keyboard market share represented by pirates is really beyond me.)

He goes through a laundry list of less popular games, demonstrating that at the lower end of the sales figures, the gap between consoles and PC closes from a gaudy 16:1 to 3:1, and somehow arrives at the figure that almost-- ALMOST-- half of FPS players worldwide are using mouse and keyboard. It is a figure he has made up from whole cloth, and even so, he could not get to parity, even when including pirates.

Never mind that mouse and keyboard use was only part of what Jones was talking about-- and yes, if he'd thought about it a bit more, perhaps he could have phrased it the way I think he meant it, which is that pre-Halo the market was leery about shooters using controllers. That is absolutely no longer the case. Even the RPS article admits that more than half of FPS players are using controllers, which was certainly not the case 10-15 years ago.

But no, Jason Jones has mocked our near religious devotion to the Microsoft platform that wasn't really made for gaming.

I really have a hard time wrapping my head around it. The Linux gaming advocates I can understand-- they just oppose companies like Microsoft and Sony in all their forms. But what the heck the objection is from people who are gaming on Windows is... I just don't get it. There's obviously some kind of brain chemical that is being dispensed when people get a kick out of believing it somehow matters that their aiming is more accurate, that they are sitting closer to a monitor with more pixels, and their rendering pipelines are more buzzword compliant.

The PC has its advantages-- most of them, as far as I can see, have to do with mods. I just have a difficult time reaching from there to a point where Jones' slightly misworded sentence about FPS games turns into a personal insult. Oh well.

And people wonder why the guy doesn't spend a lot of time talking to the press. Sheesh.