Vivez les Niches

by Troy Goodfellow on May 16, 2007

Media analysts have recently noted that entertainment audiences are fragmenting. Network television competes with cable, movie theaters compete with Netflix, and everyone competes with the Internet. There is so much choice out there that you can customize your media consumption to suit your own tastes. You can have a steady diet of sports, horror, education or politics. You find your niche and settle in it.

Audience fragmentation is the saving grace of PC gaming.

One of the big problems with the game industry today is that developers are chasing every dollar. The result is a console industry that vigorously targets mainstream tastes. Shooters, sports games and new settings for Mario… that’s console gaming in a nutshell. Even titles like Shadows of the Colossus or Killer 7 are really arthouse variants on popular genres.

On the PC, however, there is a smorgasbord of options. No one mass produces adventure games any more, but you can still find specialty developers who publish every pseudo-noir graphic tale from Europe. Where good wargames die on the retail shelves, they still have a real life in a corner of the specialty market. The openness of the PC platform means that you can almost certainly find a game that suits your tastes.

This is why the PC will never disappear as a gaming platform. Its open architecture and the lack of “certification” means that there will always be people programming for it, if only to make sure genres they like don’t disappear.

In short, PC gaming will be the equivalent of premium cable for the industry for years to come.