14 DAY TRIAL // PC gaming is dying. How many times have you heard this phrase uttered in the last three years? I know I've had my fill of it. But PC is very much alive, getting a lot of releases and some big hits (like the World of Warcraft expansion called Wrath of the Lich King or Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire) and to get the love of developers like Valve and BioWare.
Now, the Chief Executive Officer of the latter, Ray Muzyka, has told CVG that “I think there are more people playing PC games and more dollars being spent on the PC space than ever before, but it's taking a different form.”
As other analysts, he traces most of this money as being MMO subscriptions. But Muzyka is also talking about “people playing flash-based games and casual games, even core games that are played in a casual way, so maybe a more core experience and you only play them for short bursts or for half an hour or something.”
BioWare is now working on a new role playing experience called Dragon Age: Origins, set to arrive this year. After the developer tried its hand at a space based sci fi RPG with Mass Effect, which was launched in 2007 and is getting a Two Disc Edition with a lot of extra goodies, it is now returning to the fantasy setting, creating a story set to pit light against dark, while introducing a full 3D fight engine.
Muzyka commented on the efforts made by his company saying that “we can still make deep rich experiences but we have to make them easy to access, you have [to] make the control system really easy to use, and you have to make people feel like they're playing an experience that they can play how they want to play it, whether that is long sessions or short sessions.”