John Romero is a PC guy, and to him computer games have beaten gaming consoles.
"With PC you have free-to-play and Steam games for five bucks. The PC is decimating console, just through price. Free-to-play has killed a hundred AAA studios," Romero told Games Industry International.
Romero gave the interview at The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, where Romero's Apple II Plus, which he used to program his early games, was donated to the museum's collection of historical video game artifacts.
The game designer behind Doom and Doom II sees free-to-play as a natural progression from the old PC days of shareware.
"It's a different form of monetization than Doom or Wolfenstein or Quake. 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 said. "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."
And now free-to-play and freemium models are disrupting the game industry.
"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. That's what everybody is working hard on. People are spending a lot of time trying to design this the right way. They want people to want to give them money, not have to. If you have to give money, you're doing it wrong... For game designers, that's the holy grail," Romero said.
Romero believes this points to the larger flaws in video game consoles versus computer gaming.
"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," Romero stated.
And he couldn't help but compare what computer gaming was like back when he started to now.
"It's so much easier now. The whole game industry was created by indies. The publishing companies like Sierra, Broderbund, etc... the games that they published were sent to them by indie developers. The big publishers of the early '80s were indie publishers. And nowadays because there are so many SDKs to create with and people can put their apps out there on a store without any real publisher intervention, everybody can publish. There's no stopping anybody. Minecraft was put up on a webpage -- you can publish on the web, you can publish through app stores, there's no one stopping you," Romero said. "I can't even imagine making a game in 1983 and somehow getting it in a store. That's hard to do because of all these barriers between me and that store. Other people have to make decisions on it. If anybody wants to make a game nowadays, they can make their own decisions."
Romero will soon be releasing a version of his early game Dangerous Dave, from 1988, to iOS and Android devices.
Photo: Tom Hall
