PC gaming is "decimating console" thanks to its cheaper pricing, according to former id developer John Romero.
Although the latest generation of consoles is selling at a record pace, Romero believes that the PC market is still leaps and bounds ahead. "With PC you have free-to-play and Steam games for five bucks," he told Games Industry. The PC is decimating console, just through price. Free-to-play has killed a hundred AAA studios.
"It's a different form of monetization than Doom or Wolfenstein or Quake where that's free-to-play [as shareware]. Our entire first episode was free - give us no money, play the whole thing. If you like it and want to play more, then you finally pay us. To me that felt like the ultimate fair [model]. I'm not nickel-and-diming you.
"I didn't cripple the game in any design way. That was a really fair way to market a game," Romero continued. "When we put these games out on shareware, that changed the whole industry. Before shareware there were no CD-ROMs, there were no demos at all. If you wanted to buy Ultima, Secret of Monkey Island, any of those games, you had to look really hard at that box and decide to spend 50 bucks to get it."
Romero goes on to discuss how improvements in the structure of free-to-play models will help raise the level of quality for all.
"Everybody is getting better at free-to-play design, the freemium design, and it's going to lose its stigma at some point. People will settle into [the mindset] that there is a really fair way of doing it, and the other way is the dirty way. Hopefully that other way is easily noticeable by people and the quality design of freemium rises and becomes a standard."
He then goes on to further explain why he thinks PC is superior to consoles.
"The problem with console is that it takes a long time for a full cycle. With PCs, it's a continually evolving platform, and one that supports backward compatibility, and you can use a controller if you want; if I want to play a game that's [made] in DOS from the '80s I can, it's not a problem. You can't do that on a console. Consoles aren't good at playing everything. With PCs if you want a faster system you can just plug in some new video cards, put faster memory in it, and you'll always have the best machine that blows away PS4 or Xbox One."
