I have a secret. And I’m going to let you in on it. As much as I enjoy playing video games on my desktop PC, and as much as I love ragging on Mac gamers, I own a PS2. Not only do I own a PS2, but I subscribe to the Official US PlayStation magazine! If that makes me a closet geek, so be it.
In this month’s issue (107), John Davison of Ziff Davis wrote an interesting piece entitled “How Episodic Games Will Change the Playstation Experience”. In his article, he expounds upon the direction that publishers are taking to releasing smaller, lower cost games with addons down the line. He makes a good argument based upon the financing to development time trade offs.
I’ve not had as many disappointing purchases with my PS2 collection as I have with my PC collection. Those of us in the PC gaming world have seen the Release/Patch/Patch/Patch cycle since around Quake 1. It wasn’t really until the Xbox came out, that we began to see that particular cycle encroach on the console world.
The biggest losers that I see are those that rent games. Rent a game and half to download a bunch of addons. But they will get over it.
I for one am kind of looking forward to this new mindset. Market forces will determine if the end user gets ripped off. But overall, users should see fewer bugs in initial releases the promise of expandability in the future.