14 DAY TRIAL // John Romero, one of the men behind id Software and the father of modern shooters, Wolfenstein 3D, thinks that right now, the PC is beating the consoles thanks to free-to-play gaming, and that this is neither a new thing nor one that is likely to end very soon.
John Romero, one of the creators of Doom, is currently creative director for the Games and Playable Media Masters degree program at UC Santa Cruz. He shares how the model his company used a long time ago with Quake, Doom and Wolfenstein is the ultimate in far business models, where you offer part of the experience for free, without nickel-and-diming the player and without withholding any gameplay or crippling the experience in any way.
"With PC you have free-to-play and Steam games for five bucks. The PC is decimating console, just through price. Free-to-play has killed a hundred AAA studios. It's a different form of monetization than Doom or Wolfenstein or Quake where that's free-to-play [as shareware]. Your entire first episode was free – give us no money, play the whole thing. If you like it and want to play more, then you finally pay us," Romero tells Games Industry.
"That was a really fair way to market a game. When we put these games out on shareware, that changed the whole industry. Before shareware there were no CD-ROMs, there were no demos at all. If you wanted to buy Ultima, Secret of Monkey Island, any of those games, you had to look really hard at that box and decide to spend 50 bucks to get it," he comments on the way id Software used to do things.
Now Romero believes that the ever-evolving nature and unencumbered nature of the PC platforms offers is a notable advantage over consoles like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
"The problem with console is that it takes a long time for a full cycle. With PCs, it's a continually evolving platform, and one that supports backward compatibility, and you can use a controller if you want; if I want to play a game that's [made] in DOS from the '80s I can, it's not a problem. You can't do that on a console. Consoles aren't good at playing everything. With PCs if you want a faster system you can just plug in some new video cards, put faster memory in it, and you'll always have the best machine that blows away PS4 or Xbox One," Romero concludes.