PC gaming "should be like Punk Rock"
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.