Tadhg Kelly recently posted a piece called “The Mac App Store and the PC Gamepocalypse.”
In his post, Kelly says that because Apple has integrated its popular App Store into its Mac OS, PC games will have to respond. Specifically, Microsoft will have to integrate its own app store to compete, and game publishers on that store will have to adjust their pricing to compete with not only Mac apps, but each other — which will give rise to a new wave of lower-priced, micro-transaction-monetized games that will wash away traditional $50+ “box” titles.
One of the points he brings up, and I want to expand upon, is that the App Store is integrated into the operating system. That is, rather than an external service (like Steam), the games are right there for you to purchase and download. You don’t have to go looking for the service, or be computer-savvy enough to set it up properly — it’s all just a couple clicks from your desktop, conveniently bundled into the Windows OS you already know how to use.
“Integration” doesn’t mean (as some commenters on the article suggested) that the service bundles your games, tracks your friends, etc. It means that’s already part of your operating system. And yes, that is huge!
But is it the end of PC gaming as we know it? It is really, for true this time, we mean it now, the oft-announced death-knell of PC games?
Of course not.
Meet Steve
Let’s look at a hypothetical “big box” PC gamer. Let’s call him Steve. He buys two or three AAA titles a year: Medal of Call of BioCraft, etc. He plays these games 1-3 hours at a time, several times a week. (Steve dreams of 6-hour marathon sessions like he did back in college, but he’s got a family now, and suspects he doesn’t have the same gaming stamina he did when he was 23.)
According to Tadhg Kelly, Steve will abandon these games when something cheaper comes along. But something cheaper has already come along. To name a few:
- A near-infinite number of (mostly good) Flash games on Kongregate, Newgrounds, and a bunch of other sites I’m not going to look up for this example.
- High-quality free-to-play shooters (mostly from Korea) which cost nothing but a little bit of your soul.
- To say nothing of the swell of AAA MMOs rising from the subscription sea, warbling their siren call, “Free to play! Ten cents for a health potion!”
Will Steve sample the wares of Microsoft’s hypothetical app store? Sure. Especially if they’re cheap or free. But he won’t abandon what he considers his “real” games to play these little gems exclusively.
But Judy will.
Meet Judy
Let’s meet Steve’s wife, Judy. She’s got a PC (one of Steve’s hand-me-downs) that she uses for e-mail and Facebook and managing the family finances because Steve is just useless when it comes to such things (how hard is it to keep your receipt from the ATM, really?!).
Judy’s not a PC gamer. Oh, she’ll play Solitaire and Minesweeper since it’s already on that button labeled “games” on the menu. And she’s played some match-three game that showed up on her Yahoo homepage. (It installed new buttons on her IE toolbar, but she ignores them.) But she doesn’t identify herself as a gamer. And she certainly won’t seek out games to buy, either online or in the store.
Enter the app store. Now, when Judy clicks “games” to find Solitaire, she’s presented with a wide range of attractive, fun-looking games for sale. None of them are expensive. Many are free. And they’re all just a click away. No worries about where to install or what drivers to update. She just clicks, and it works. And now “Angry Birds PC Deluxe!” has joined Solitaire as one of her top-played games.
Will Judy start buying and playing Steve-style “big” games? Probably not. Those are for gamers. She’s not one of those people. She just plays a couple games on her PC.
My Point – and a Footnote
My point? I don’t think a PC app store will destroy traditional PC game publishing, but will create a new market of non-gamers. And that’s A Good Thing.
Of course, all this hypothesizing relies on Microsoft introducing an app store to Windows and not screwing it up. Games for Windows Live, anyone?
Yeah. That’s what I thought.
