It seems once again I’m writing a piece that refutes PC World writer Matt Peckham’s thoughts. I was reading his piece “What happens if we boycott the PC version of Modern Warfare 2” and once again my head started to hurt.
Having read numerous posts of his before, he is constantly bringing attention to the sad state of PC gaming. On the first page of his post though, he brings the idea of boycotting the PC edition of COD4 Modern Warfare 2. Before I get into the actual meat of the article I just have to opine of how stupid the idea of boycotting a PC game for a console platform is. Why would any fan of PC gaming do exactly what the studios want? Why would we purposely tank the sales on a platform that most publishers want to kill? Many game studios have already abandoned the PC and are waiting for any excuse to drop it. So by all means lets buy COD4 Modern Warfare 2 for Xbox 360 or PS3 and make sure PC gaming dies. Stupid.
So why would anyone come up with such a ridiculous idea? It seems the main crux of his argument is that a PC version would not have anything to differentiate it from the console versions. Well guess what, when your now a minority in market share content developers are not going to spend time to make your product special. It’s plain and simple economics. One down.
Next he brings up once again DRM. As I have said before DRM is an evil that is not going away anytime soon, so it bears no real weight to bring it up again and again as a detractor. He goes on to say that the use of Valve’s Steam platform is a deal breaker. For me, Steam is about as close as you can get to DRM done right. It allows use on multiple systems, just not at the same time. It also allows me to access games that I normally would not be able to get a hold of, and from the comfort of my home. Plus if you catch a sale, you can get great software for next to nothing. Couple this with the fact that if your system gets hosed you just re-download the games and it works for me.
He then goes on to say that if we boycott the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 Activison may just drop PC support all together. Um, I’m pretty sure we all figured that one out. Which brings me back to his headline, so why would be boycott the PC version?