Awakened dev talks to benefits of PC development
Phosphor Games’ Project Awakened may, at one point, have been viable for the console market, but the studio is now looking to exclusively target the PC crowd. This seems true of a lot of gaming’s best new projects lately, and there’s a reason for it. According to Chip Sineni, PC games are easier to distribute, and cater to a more open-minded customer.
“The PC market is very exciting to developers for many reasons,” explained the Phosphor director. “The first one is distribution — not only do you not have a box to worry about, you don’t have an overly complicated and expensive submission process. It can’t be understated how expensive all of that is.
“The other thing that I don’t think gets called out enough is the audience. The PC audience is just a lot more receptive to new, different ideas and is willing to pay for ideas they like. There really isn’t an audience like that on any other platform.”
PC Master Race, MOBILIZE! Sineni has the right of it there — it just seems true that a certain failure on a console can be a major success on PC. The low costs certainly help, leading as they often do to lower prices, and thus a consumer more willing to pay.
More than that, word of mouth just spreads so quickly among the PC gaming crowd, where news of a game’s existence, and the means to buy that game, exist just a few clicks away from each other. Thanks, Internet!
Are there any downsides to the PC market? Any worries Phosphor may have about digital distribution? Not many, apparently, and even those are negligible.
“In terms of downsides, there is always piracy, but that is pretty much on every platform now regardless,” explains Sineni. “I know some cost-conscience players miss that there is no used market for PC like there is on console, but PC games are usually priced so much lower than a big console game, so it’s nearly a non-issue.”
Sounds fair to me! With console games seeming to piss off core gamers more and more, I’m not sure there’s a better time to embrace the cold, calculating heart of a gaming PC. So cold … so cold.
[Check out our full exclusive on Phosphor’s Awakened Kickstarter drive.]
