Armchair Speculation Pt 2

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Wednesday, February 27, 2013, 21:22 (4075 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Lastly, if you look at the numbers, console revenue has been declining steadily, while PC revenue has been rising, actually eclipsing and passing console revenue. So, the PC is where the money's at, and the console is on it's way out. Why stay excusively on this sinking ship?

This is ludicrous even for you. This is almost certainly due to the stage we're at in the console cycle. The existing generations have hit the point of diminishing returns-- more work on a AAA title for 360/PS3 now is not going to deliver an improvement in graphics or features over games released 1-2 years ago because all the possible optimization has already been done. Meanwhile, the PS4 is already announced and the next Xbox will be shortly. The current platforms are lame ducks-- they have a nice installed base, but everyone knows the party is coming to an end soon. The new platforms will have excitement, but it will take them years to build up a population of gamers. This is why Bungie is doing what they are doing-- releasing on both the new and old platforms. Since they're not owned by a platform holder, there is no reason to be an exclusive on a particular platform or generation, so it makes sense to be everywhere.

The PC is certainly not where the money is at. That's loony. This is a transition period to the next generation. We've seen it before, and the only doomsayers calling this "the end of console gaming" are the same ones who've been saying it since E.T. ended up in a landfill.

I could certainly see it happening that the PC version of Destiny might, if it were launched simultaneously, outsell one or both next-gen console versions, at least temporarily, just due to installed base, but frankly I'd be willing to bet heavily that the last-gen versions would outsell both, possibly combined.

The only places doomsaying about no PC versions are PC gaming evangelists.

What would the entire gaming and tech press be saying if Bungie had gone PC-only, eschewing both current and next-gen consoles? It'd be suicide, and rightly labeled as such. The only PC-first, PC-only franchise that worldwide does the kind of business that could justify that is WoW itself, and that's because of the subscription model. The market so far does not seem to really have room for a second player in that space, hence the F2P + microtransactions model than every so-called "WoW killer" is now employing.

If I had to guess, the only thing I can come up with is that due to the way XBL and PSN servers work, that the cost of support (which is any MMO's biggest expense) could possibly be quite low compared to that of a PC release, sustainable by the retail price and DLC packs.

I don't expect those costs to be anywhere near what an MMO's is. An MMO needs to track the location of all players in a shard at all times. I do not expect Destiny to do that. Their description of "shared world" reads a lot more like seamless drop-in drop-out coop, which probably means an invisible playlist that activates when you enter a level or area and puts a few players into each others' games once in awhile so that the world feels less empty than if you were playing solo. It's not tracking hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of players and their inventories plus mobs over a huge continuous territory. I think they're trying to get as close as possible to the feel of that without actually having to wrangle all the bits.

It's entirely likely that being independent, the structure of the new deal gives Bungie enough of the take to cover their own infrastructure costs and then some, compared to the MS days where there was no "Bungie take" since they were a subsidiary, or the last two Halo titles, where they were subcontractors. It seems likely to me that if Bungie is invested in the "shared world shooter" model from the top down (which I believe it is) they are willing to take the hit for any infrastructure over and above what XBL or PSN provide if it enables their vision for the game. It's reasonable to assume that as a publisher, not an owner, Activision's end of the Destiny contract gives them less of a share than MS got from Halo as an owner. Bungie may be able to make the same amount of revenue per copy after the extra expenses as they did with Halo.

Pure speculation, of course.