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?

We're at the end of a console generation AND in the middle of a global economic downturn; I wouldn't necessarily interpret this as meaning they're staying with a ‘sinking ship’.

As for the other points you've raised; I've wondered about that myself too, but it seems that at least Microsoft is going down an always-online route for their new hardware platform. If that turns out to be true then maybe people will just have to get used to that requirement? Certainly the trend is for fewer and fewer people to not be connected, so eventually you have to extrapolate a point where not being online is as unlikely as not having running water or electricity. We're a way off that right now, but when you're building a game universe with a 10 year plan, you tend to look a bit further ahead than last year's numbers.

You've actually got it backwards, doing a search on Google, it's 75%-85% of consoles ARE connected to the Internet. Here's an example article:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-all-digital-console-is-a-myth-despite-steam-box-and-discless...

Also, they have done research I am sure. Pure speculation, but I bet that the majority of people that don't connect their consoles to the Internet do not buy that many games for it, especially games like Halo, CoD, or Destiny.

Edit: I believe I found the statistic you were thinking of, only ~30% of households own a console connected to the Internet but that is out of all households, not just households with consoles.

Here's another article that talks about it:
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/75140.html

Specifically:

Today, approximately 40 percent of all U.S. broadband households own at least one Internet-connected device, with game consoles accounting for 75 percent of these products.

I agree with your overall point: leaving money on the table with the PC would be foolish. Partly, because I want that! Given that you seem to hate the F2P model, aka "the dominant FPS model in Asia", I'm not sure why you'd advocate for Bungie to make a push for the asian market.

EDIT: I saw that you corrected your mistake regarding the numbers above, my bad.

There must be something I am not seeing.

First, the decision to require an internet connection cuts out literally 75% of the people who own current gen consoles. I am not kidding, because as of last year, I believe it was the NPD that said 75% of current gen game consoles are never taken online. That's a huge chunk of potential players that are out of the picture. Destiny has been in development for how long? I have no doubt it's going to be 100+ million. How are enough people going to buy it?!

Citation? The nearest figure I see is the ratio between XBL subscribers and total 360 sales, which is about 50/50.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/xbox-statistics/

For Xbox 360, it's likely the requirement won't mean much more for users than "logged into XBL"-- similar to what's required for owners of XBLA titles linked to a certain account, which is just about anyone who's had to replace an out of warranty 360 and redownload their purchases.

My internet is crap, but my 360 still logs into XBL at startup and usually manages to stay connected. If Destiny's servers are smart, they'll let me play solo and not force anyone into my laggy game, and it was recently confirmed that you can play solo.

So the question is how much overlap is there between the attach rate for a Bungie shooter on the 360, and the conversion rate or XBL on the 360. Then again, from Bungie's perspective, the online populations of both the 360 and the PS3 combined might very well equal their usual shooter population.

In fact, not being on the PlayStation in the last 2 generations probably had a much larger effect on the potential player base for a Bungie game than an online requirement across 4-5 platforms (Xbox 360, Durango, PS3, PS4, PC) will have on Destiny. And if Bungie is being smart, their infrastructure will have been built to support all those platforms from the start, plus mobile interaction. Parsons has practically said as much already.

Second, since they've already decided to go with the always connected model, not making a PC version seems insane.

They probably will. I'd venture to guess that the issues involved in making a title cross-platform between the 360 and the PS3 and/or the Xbox 720 and the PS4 dwarf those involved in making a PC port from any of the above. (Although PS4-PC is obviously going to be easier than it was with PS3.)

The problem is that MS investment in the Xbox essentially leaves PC gaming without a stakeholder. Bungie's history with MS meant they got first dibs, but only for platforms that are officially announced: so that means Xbox 360, confirmed at the first reveal. As a third party, MS is not going to let Bungie steal their thunder by confirming the Durango at the Destiny reveal.

Bungie being new to Sony's ecosystem, and Sony announcing the PS4 first, meant they got the first next-gen announcement, along with the "exclusive content" thing tacked on to sweeten the deal.

MS hasn't announced the next Xbox yet, and they're the closest thing that PC gaming has to a stakeholder. So there's no way that Bungie is going to confirm a PC release before they confirm a Durango release, especially since there's probably as much or more overlap there than anywhere else.

You have China and South Korea, both of which are huge markets for MMO or 'Shared World' games as Bungie wants to call it. Several MMOFPS games are popular in Korea. Software piracy is pretty much non existent for these types of games due to the connection requirement, and thus since they are popular, they are pretty lucrative. Console gaming is not popular in Korea, and I believe consoles can;t even be sold in China, so keeping the game console only seems maddening unless for some reason they don't think they can get this market.

I doubt China or Korea have been significant markets for Bungie in the past, just as Japan has not. While it would certainly be wise to target those markets, it would be risky to make significant investments based on expectations in those markets. Given Bungie's narrow focus on action, I'd guess that their take on the MMOFPS will lack may of the elements that appeal to gamers in those markets.

That said, I think there will be a PC version. It's just a very, very open question how well that version will do in those three markets. It's quite likely they will have content issues there, as WoW has had in China for quite some time.

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.

Can someone point me to where Bungie said there will be no Micro Transactions? The only place I heard this was Claude, and every other outlet says Activision did not comment on that particular topic.

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