It's easy to deride the gaming industry as it stands but the question is what does PC gaming need to be great again? What has it lost that once made it so great.
One word comes to mind, Bullfrog. Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Theme Hospital, each a completely unique idea perfectly executed. Peter Molyneux of course is still around but we no longer get games of that caliber. I wonder if it's because of the fact that authorship of games has disappeared. They are now the products of corporations, not the vision of one man.
Before, a small team could create a game that could compete on a world wide market. Now, with graphics paramount this has disappeared almost entirely. One man operations like Gratuitous Space Battles are frankly shallow. On the opposite side we have ASCII based games like Dwarf fortress which have depth but no graphics to speak of at all.
It's amazing to me that something has not happened to bring back authorship. But the fact is that tools like XNA do make it all easier but there is a huge difference between making some pixel art and building 3D model and traversing 3D space in code is no trivial task. Before a writer or developer could mock up a game with a chance of being successful in a few days (at least a simple one.) Now it would take much longer, we see people trying to sell their 3D pong remakes that it took them months to create. Creativity has given way to necessity.
I hope that we will see soon that the power returns to the author, Prometheus needs to come down a second time and put things right again.
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