Category: Gaming

There’s been a lot of talk re­cent­ly about why PC gam­ing is “doomed”, main­ly be­cause of the ev­er-grow­ing amount of PC game pira­cy. I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think that PC gam­ing is doomed at all, although I do think there will be a sig­nif­i­cant shift in the way the PC game mar­ket works - to­wards a more con­trolled dis­tri­bu­tion mod­el, per­haps, like Steam.

This is what I think about pira­cy, how­ev­er. It’s a self-sus­tain­ing cy­cle, in a way: high video game prices en­cour­age gamers to pi­rate games in­stead of buy­ing them, “forc­ing” video game man­u­fac­tur­ers to raise prices or keep prices high in order to not lose rev­enue. Those high prices in turn con­tin­ue to en­cour­age pira­cy. This loop is not nec­es­sar­i­ly un­break­able, though there are sev­er­al fac­tors that, in my opin­ion, con­tribute to its sus­te­nance:
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[Last time][cpc] I wrote about try­ing to find ca­su­al games for medi­um/large-group so­cial events. We can split mul­ti­play­er video gam­ing in­to a cou­ple of vague­ly-de­fined cat­e­gories; I’m go­ing to use the term “ca­su­al” or “so­cial gam­ing” to refer to medi­um-scale so­cial gath­er­ings that in­volve video gam­ing; hard­core gam­ing, of course, is all about the game; and we might per­haps call the last group “LAN par­ty gam­ing” to indi­cate a mid­dle ground be­tween ca­su­al gam­ing and su­per-in­tense gam­ing.

[cpc]: http://non­graph­i­cal.com/2008/09/ca­su­al-games-for-the-pc/
[hom­m3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_of_Might_and_Mag­ic_III

It is for the first cat­e­go­ry, so­cial gam­ing, that I sug­gest a game to­day: [Heroes of Might and Mag­ic III][hom­m3]. Read more…