Let's suppose for a minute that "The Man" is north American.  He would have you believe that PC gaming is dying, and were I to take a walk through my local EB I'd be inclined to agree.  So why is this once powerful platform withering away - at least in the mind of "the man"?  

They'd have us believe that piracy is to blame. Clearly, people who are willing to spend thousands of dollars bulding their dream PCs are nothing more than digital thieves. 

I have a different theory for why the likes of Ubisoft are seeing a decline in their PC sales.  It's no accident that I've singled out Ubisoft as a company that just doesn't "get it", their latest announcement of draconian DRM coupled with an inflated price for Assassin's Creed 2 points to an overall lack of understanding of the industry.  


PC gamers aren't looking to pay a $10 dollar markup on a game for no discernable reason (we have Activision to thank for that), and we certainly don't want to be forced to be connected to the Internet at all times while playing the game (as opposed to a one time online authentication).  It's as though for every positive these companies create for the platform has to be offset by a negative. 

Let's look at Grand Theft Auto IV; a port that took nearly a year to appear on the PC.  The thing Rockstar nailed with this game was the controls, you could seamlessly change between keyboard and mouse and the Xbox 360 controller. Not only would the game recognize both, but in-game prompts would recognize which control method you were using at the time and would change to reflect this; it's an implementation I haven't seen duplicated yet.  Inexplicabily though the game was very poorly optimized, needing a Quad Core CPU to function well, as well as being ladelled with all this other junk. You need both a Rockstar and Games For Windows Live account to play this game.  On top of that, you can't even enter a multiplayer game until you've loaded up your latest single player game.  I can see how the in-game navigation of using your cell to do everything is cool, but this unnecessary interface step just boggled my mind.  

It sounds crazy, but it seems like the only huge developer/publisher that "gets it" is EA. Their PC ports lately have been a thing of beauty, and haven't been laden with unnecessary levels of DRM. Just take a look at Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2. Both games (developed by Bioware - who is owned by EA) had fantastic PC ports and weren't given any additional DRM when distributed over Steam. Hell, many people will say that the PC version of Dragon Age is such an improvement over the console versions that it should be regarded as the definitive version of the game. These games weren't sold at an astounding $60, and Dragon Age was even found on sale on Steam shortly after its release.

What kind of a world do we live in where the likes of Activision and Ubisoft are trying to squeeze us for every penny we have, but EA is actually giving us great value for a decent price? It used to be that we'd look to Activision and Ubisoft for our innovative ideas and new games - remember Beyond Good & Evil. Now these two companies are content with pushing out the same content year after year, with more and more restrictive DRM and higher prices. I just don't get it.