PC gaming "should be like Punk Rock"

By Tom Bramwell Published 10 January, 2008

Spore developer loves its variety.

Former Civilization IV designer Soren Johnson, currently hard at work on Spore, reckons PC gaming "should be like Punk Rock" for developers - rich with variety.

"The PC market is no one thing any more," he told Eurogamer pals Rock, Paper, Shotgun. "There's no sales figures you can look at. The question is simply is 'What is the variety coming through? What are the different options available we didn't have three or four years ago?'

"For me, PC gaming should be like Punk Rock - being able to do whatever you want. And people are forgetting that the Punk period isn't just the Ramones and the Sex Pistols... it's Talking Heads, Televisions, Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Gang of Four... this huge variety of stuff because people were making it up as they were going along.

"It was easy enough to make music that people did what they wanted to. And that'll always be the advantage of PCs."

Johnson's belief that PC game trends are poorly represented through publicly available stats certainly holds true if you look, for instance, at the UK Chart-Track statistics, which suggest a console market in the ascendancy and a PC market in steady decline.

On the other hand, you have companies like Valve boasting of 13 million PC users around the world for Steam, and World of Warcraft alone having attracted over 9.3 million subscribers - despite the fact the latter's "Battle Chest" is its only presence in the UK charts, and at ninth in the PC-only Top 20 at that.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (23) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • tobsen #1 4 years ago

    If console gaming happens to turn into Muzak thanks to Nintendo now, I would definitely appreciate some punkrock-style PC gaming for an alternative

  • crozon #2 4 years ago

    to get a better understanding of where pc sales are going you need to take into account sales from digital distributers, mmos revenue etc., until they do a study of that i am not buying pc is in decline talk

    i buy most of my games from shops like play.com and game, however any valve game i buy it off steam, plus a few others like rogue trooper

  • smoison #3 4 years ago

    PC gaming is soo varied it will always bring more and more people into gaming.

    That and the prices are unbeatable.
    Edited by 2 at 10/01/08 @ 16:45

  • skillian #4 4 years ago

    He's right, that's why I'm a PC gamer.

    Messing around with drivers and the like is just the equivalent of getting spat on at gigs - it's all part of the fun :p

  • orzo #5 4 years ago

    refreshing interview, definitely worth clicking the link

  • lambtron #6 4 years ago

    By "being like Punk Rock" let's hope he doesn't mean 90% of it will be utter shit and it will fizzle out after a few years ;).

  • PearOfAnguish #7 4 years ago

    "By "being like Punk Rock" let's hope he doesn't mean 90% of it will be utter shit and it will fizzle out after a few years ;)."

    No no, that's the PS3.

  • djprozac #8 4 years ago

    Oh no he didn't!! ;)

  • smelly #9 4 years ago

    >If console gaming happens to turn into Muzak thanks to Nintendo now

    See, I know i'm going to upset some people here.. But gaming turned into Pop Muzak around the playstation era.

    Playstation marked the start of the decline of "true" hardcore gaming experiences. And marked the start of games like fifa and nfs selling year in year out.. Where the consumers didnt want hardcore games, they wanted easy games with oodles of violence and great graphics.

    People bought into the playstation when they saw LOTS and LOTS of playstation games on the shelves. They looked over at nintendo's game shelf which had 1/10th of the games (90% of which were AAA), but in comparision to the playstations catalog (most of which were shit) the consumer believed "more equals better" regardless of quality.

    Of course, nintendo has looked at what the playstation acheived and are running with it. But they're not doing anything different to what sony did years ago.

    Now you could argue that the xbox is the "punker" machine, but it's not really doing anything other than taking the ex-pc owning market and all the genres of games they love, and put it on a console. HOWEVER, i do firmly believe that XBLA is the root of potentially some great "punk" games (look a jeff minters "space girraffe" which, although apparently didnt sell - you wouldn't get on many other platforms).

    So maybe microsoft IS the new punk? (i dont know if i find that depressing or not.. lol)

  • toy_brain #10 4 years ago

    smelly, I expect better of you.

    Or do I? Christ it's hard to remember the good members from the bad ones these days.

  • smelly #11 4 years ago

    >smelly, I expect better of you.

    In what way? I thought what i posted was fairly well rounded and didnt "big up" or "blow down" any one particular machine (which you seem to have to be VERY careful of doing around these parts).

    .. and pretty much based on the facts of what happened?

  • smelly #12 4 years ago

    Hmm.. perhaps with my closing comments i was too "pro" microsoft and anti sony/nintendo?

    I'm not sure how fanboys think any more.. It seems impossible to have a discussion without upsetting one camp or another (or inviting a troll like kryon into the mix)

  • stoopidgreg #13 4 years ago

    it's television, not televisions...

    anyway, i would say most of those bands are new wave and not strictly punk.

  • toy_brain #14 4 years ago

    "Hmm.. perhaps with my closing comments i was too "pro" microsoft and anti sony/nintendo?"

    Just the usual blaming Sony for everything thats bad in todays industry - including killing the old Nintendo (seriously? Now Nintendo going to crap is Sony's fault? jeesus).
    Its an argument thats been thrashed out way too many times, so I'm not going to go into it yet again now.

    The various Playstation consoles have all been host to a number of very 'punk' (seriously, we gonna start using that word regularly now? I hope not) games, some even by Sony's internal studios.
    Edited by 1 at 10/01/08 @ 22:21

  • smelly #15 4 years ago

    >Now Nintendo going to crap is Sony's fault? jeesus

    I DIDN'T say they were going to crap.. and i didnt say it was sony's fault.

    Just that sony were the first to REALLY notice there was a market in the mainstream audience (THATS A GOOD THING!!!). Think about it before sony gaming was restricted to nerds in bedrooms .. sony took playstations and put them in night clubs, etc. If you dont think it was sony that first opened gaming up to the mainstream - then quite frankly you're delusional.

    I'd say something like 90% of the people who visit this website would never have gotten into gaming if it wasnt for the playstation. I find it funny that these people now consider themselves "hardcore".. Sometimes i wonder if the people introduced to gaming via the wii now will consider THEMSEVLES harcdore in a few years time..

    Nintendo have just copied that philosophy of not just appealing to the hardcore. If they had carried on making the same rock hard "hardcore" games they made before playstation then they'd be out of business by now. Even when they do release a "hardcore" game nowadays (say mario galaxy) it doesnt sell. Because the majority of gamers nowadays are no longer hardcore. They want simplicity, they want easy, they want "adult" content (be it rude words/violence/gore/etc).

    (as proved by the number of generic/easy/carbon copy games which top the charts year in year out)

    Nintendo has learned the lessons from the past and have got the first two covered... Which probably accounts for their popularity again. But to state they're the ONLY console which appeals to the mainstream is a nonsense (Especially after ps2, dancepads, eye toy, buzz, etc.. and also with the xbox with it's selection of mainstream catbon copy sports/racing/shooting games).

    >Its an argument thats been thrashed out way too many times,

    Well maybe if numerous people say it, then it's the correct argument?



    Edited by 1 at 10/01/08 @ 23:55

  • 3william56 #16 4 years ago

    Gaming as a whole became non punk when it became popular, as all media forms do. Big audience = big money = less risk taking = lots more conventional content, and the indies squeezed out. Same as music, movies, books, magazines, whatever. Whether it's console or PC makes no difference.

    The real "punk" thing at the moment is the rise of online micro purchasing, on PC, XBLA and PSN, opening up the market to smaller, independant games developers, to allow more radical concepts to be distributed to the masses without a million dollar budget. Everyday Shooter is a perfect example of a 1 man band masterpiece right on the front page now, as were GeoWars and Space Giraffe - "short fast loud" (and cheap!).

    Giving the indie games (and corporate pseudo indies like Pain) equal prominence alongside the Halo3, HL2 and MGS blockbusters is a great thing - you can have the Ramones, or you can have Dire Straights as you choose.

  • MGG #17 4 years ago

    @Disc:

    "Hi Will. I'd like money to do what I want.

    Developing for the PC does not give me my money.

    So screw the PC. "

    Why do you say that? Its such a common misconception - but developing for the PC can also return a much higher % to you as the developer than any of the consoles. As has been pointed out in the article, a lot of PC sales are in different avenues to those monitored by people like ChartTrack etc - thus giving a very skewed idea about the possible returns on your development.

    Also you have to take into account that developing for the PC is many, many times cheaper than developing for anything else - no dev kits, no specialised expensive SDK's required and you get to use your own selection of favourite tools to boot. Heck, developing for the PC can be done for free in terms of development software (GCC etc) and engines(IrrLicht etc) - what other platform allows that? Also, with some planning done before development is started, you can make your PC project cross-platform much easier than if you start with a console - even if its "just" moving to Mac and Linux, or even X360.


    edit: damn tags!
    Edited by 1 at 11/01/08 @ 03:39

  • BremXJones #18 4 years ago

    Stoopidgreg: New Wave = Marketting term to sell punk to people too scared by Punk.

    That said, it's irrelevant, as he said "punk period", which is a subtly different thing, and all of them were absolutely feeding from the same place.

    Typo was my fault in the original interview.

    KG

  • tobsen #19 4 years ago

    @ smelly

    I think there is a difference between "mainstream" and "muzak". Games like the first Wipeout might stand for "mainstream" gaming, but these kind of games still did and do uphold certain standards of quality and originality. The stream of rubbish recently released for the Wii is something else entirely in my opinion, it's a sign of a market approach where "product quality" as gamers understand it becomes more and more irrelevant.

  • smelly #20 4 years ago

    erm, i think everyone seems to be agreeing with me here.

    Right.. hands up all in agreement that xblive is the new punk?

    hands up in agreement that there's a lot of cynical tatt on the wii made up by marketing men who seem to think the only stuff that'll sell on the wii is mini games?

    Hands up all those who agree that gaming went "mainstream" back in ps1 days!


    (hands up to all 3? good)

  • MGG #21 4 years ago

    I would argue that games "went mainstream" with the Atari VCS ;)

    And then again with the Nintendo NES (or Famicom, depending on where you come from)

    And then again the SNES (or SuperFamicom)

    And then again with the Gameboy.

    And then again with the PS1.

    And again with the DS/Wii.


    Its all very cycical - when a product comes out that really catches the imagination, people will buy it. Does that make it mainstream? Ask a "non-gamer" to give examples of games past and present, and I would bet any answers you do get will be tied very tightly with the above big sellers - Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man - then onto Mario, Donkey Kong, Duck Hunt - then Super Mario Land, SF2, Mario Kart - then Tetris - then Wipeout - then Brain Training, Wii Sports, Mario again.

    The interesting ones are the parts of the cycle when the crash occurs - what games and hardware were released then? Why did they flop? Were consoles such as the ColecoVision, the N64, the Saturn, the Dreamcast and the GameCube really that bad? Or was it just bad timing/publicity? What will happen next - has the fan base that Nintendo and the big 2 have built up be enough to stop there being another "crash"? Or is it inevitable?

  • TitusCrow #22 4 years ago

    well if by punk you mean, lone programers puting out quirky cool games with little budget and having a hit, you would have to say that XBLA is the only place left for these sorts of games to have an avenue of release.
    though everyone knows the real punk happened during the 80's when tons of great games were put out by lone programers and hits came from nowhere on a regular basis. due to the way games are made now this will never be possible again, crazy budgets massive dev cycles and the fact that having a failure isnt an option with so much at risk means we cant have punk production and we dont have a punk atitude.
    No more will you have that devil may care attitude of every game is an experiment, i bet every one out there goes through target audience panels and all sorts of market placment / demographic crap. I cant blame them i guess with as much at stake as there is to not fire a bullet blind.
    punk was the wild west, the wild west is dead now we have sudo punk! all the posturing none of the drugs!
    if XBLA is punk who is the new prog is what i want to know
    "goes to put on some rush - ahh! 2112 this will do nicely!"

  • archonsod #23 4 years ago

    "due to the way games are made now this will never be possible again, crazy budgets massive dev cycles and the fact that having a failure isnt an option with so much at risk means we cant have punk production and we dont have a punk atitude."

    The reason we had those games in the 80's is because the previous crazy budget, massive dev cycle market crashed. Some blame that crash on the gaming market turning into the kind of generic cash in's people currently complain about in the mainstream. So you never know, it could happen again.

    The indie scene has always been quite successful on the PC anyway. I mean, anyone remember that classic of the shareware market, Doom?