Eroding the foundations ...

It's interesting to see how worked up people can get over their personal hobbies. Even kids will fight over who is the coolest Pokémon or which Jonas Brother is the cutest (*insert nauseating sound*) so it's a bit of an international sport: everyone does it.

Even when it comes to gamers - especially when it comes to gamers - you don't have to look far to find such arguments. Console vs PC, FPS vs RPG, Xbox vs Playstation, mouse & keyboard vs gamepad, etc. etc. etc. More than enough arguments which you'll find repeated on countless forums. But, once in a while, a new argument surfaces and may actually be worth taking a closer look at ...

The latest such case is the lack of dedicated server support for the PC version of Call of Duty Modern War 2. I won't explain why this is a bad thing - there's hundreds of other sites that have already done this - but suffice to say, it wasn't a smart move by Infinity Ward. Earlier, it was already known that PC gamers wouldn't be getting the Prestige Edition with included Night Vision Goggles which already seemed like a poor move but this one really takes the cake!

The explosive response from the PC gaming community was immense: over 100.000 poll votes to bring back dedicated servers in less than half a week. The official forums were swamped with negative messages of gamers saying they cancelled their pre-order or threatening to do so. Is this an overreaction? Well, some responses obviously are but here's why I think it's natural and important for the community to respond this way:

10 years ago, PC gaming was at its peak. It could easily beat any console in term of versatility: RTS, RPGs, flight simulators, space simulators, adventure games, etc. etc. It could play every game consoles could and then some. The most popular genre of them all, however, was the FPS. Very popular with the majority of gamers, casual and hardcore alike, it brought thousands of fresh gamers to the PC. Games such as Quake II, Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament and many others attracted millions of gamers online to battle each other. Consoles had no online answer to this so at that time, the PC was king.

Over the last half a decade or so, we've seen a worrying change, however. More and more, publishers are stepping away from the PC towards consoles - even for FPS games which consoles were never that good at. At best, we get a multi-platform release, whereby the PC version is crippled due to the limitations of its sister consoles. Barely any effort is made any more to take advantage of the PC's superior hardware and flexibility either - whereas a keyboard has over a 100 keys, barely 15 will be used for any game meaning you often see a lack of leaning left & right and other features us PC gamers have gotten used to. It's a worrying trend and one that doesn't seem to be slowing down with fewer and fewer PC-only games still being released each month.

And this is why it's important for us to speak up: publishers all too easily push us in a corner and see us, PC gamers, as an afterthought. We often get games months after their console release in a poorly optimised state and the support which we saw in the past (updates, extra maps, etc.) seems to be slowly dwindling in favour of DLC (downloadable content you need to pay for), another invention originating on the consoles to beat more money out of our pockets.

While I'm sure there's economical reasons for all this, it makes you wonder how far we should go in accepting these changes since we pay just as much money as before for less. We've already had to accept such things as Windows Live, DRM, limited activations, removal of LAN, poor mouse/keyboard integration, etc. The result is that our own hobby is being slowly assimilated to match that of a console experience! I'm sure some of you may think "well what's wrong with console gaming" and I'll answer you this: if I wanted to play a console game, I'd play it on my Xbox 360. I have a PC to play PC games, not poor console ports.

And now we come full circle: if we value our hobbies, we need to defend them. This is not about evolution, this is about wanting to keep what we love about our hobby PC gaming, what makes it unique compared to the other gaming platforms. Call it "PC elitism" or whatever you want, but in the end, we simply want to keep playing the great games we received in the past.