Master Chief's Wild Ride

The year is 2000. PC gamers everywhere rejoice in the fact that the minds behind the Myth franchise are now bringing a totally new I.P to the he PC. Halo, slated as the game above all games. Everyone was very excited, that is until Bill Gates and his fleet of gray-suits marched on the independent developer. What could have been the single most influential game on the PC was now gobbled up and spit back out as an Xbox title, possibly never to see light on the PC....EVER.

We all know what happened after that. Seven years later, we have seen numerous books, magazines, and other licensed products. Now, the final chapter in the Halo trilogy is out, selling over $170 million in the first 24 hours of release. Let's face it, Halo 3 is a BEAST! A beast that could have been on the PC. However, now it seems after these long years that Bungie Studio's is now free. They are no longer part of Microsoft Game Studios. Bungie now goes back to being an independent game developer but MS Game Studios are still going to publish their future games.
What started as rumor last week, has now become a reality. I'm glad to see that Bungie wants to spread their wings a bit after being locked in a kennel for the better part of a decade. What is evident to me after all of this is the fact that Microsoft cannot sustain 2 gaming platforms simultaneously.

Microsoft has two business models, one for the Xbox, and one for everything else. By dissecting the target markets of both models we can see who MS is trying to sell games to and how they do it. Earlier this year, we heard lots of mumblings about the Games for Windows initiative, and Games for Windows Live!, the PC version of Xbox live. Six months later where is the "continued support" where is the cross compatibility, the cohesive branding? Its doesn't exist! Thats the point. All of it was a ploy to push Vista to the hard-core early adopters of the tech world. Mostly hardcore gamers like myself. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the push backfired in their faces. Vista's harsh requirements allow for only the heaviest of duty rigs to run it correctly. For most people including gamers, we don't need an OS that has tons of pretty frilly bullshit floating around the desktop. We want something that does what it should without requiring a $10,000 hardware upgrade to play a game at decent frame rate. This is where my conspiracy theorist comes out. All this is leading me to one conclusion. Microsoft doesn't want you to play games on the computer anymore. They want you locked into their Xbox 360 or whatever next gen shit that comes out. Here is a list of why MS might try this.

1. Hardware - Locking you into playing games on the 360 will only move more units, padding their pocket book. They own the platform, they make the hardware, so you can't build your own or buy it more cheaply from other suppliers. You buy it at their price, or you don't play. Period. Pretty much a text book vertical monopoly.
   
2. Software - As most companies learned from the demise of the Atari 2600, that product licensing means big bucks. Not just anyone can make an Xbox game. You have to go to Microsoft and ask their permission, usually meaning pay a sum of money to get their blessing and a set of development tools. This being in contrast to the PC, a truly open platform, where anyone can design a game. This limits the ability mod makers, indie developers, and other small time game designers to get their games out to the public.
3. Piracy and Profitability - The single factor that pushes PC developers to port games to every console is the fact that piracy is rampant on the PC. Illegal copies are floating around the net just waiting for you to leech the torrent. So if a developer plans to make a game for the PC, they are expecting a certain percent of their profits to be destroyed by game pirates. The fact that Xbox requires heavy copy protection on their software gives game developers a false sense of security. Developers are lured away from the PC because of their fears of pirates stealing their money. As big business devours the gaming industry, the bottom line will become more of a tipping point. "If you can't make money selling it, why sell it at all?"

Lets face it. It all boils down to money, and lets face it, Microsoft is good at making it. They have the majority of the market share for operating systems, what makes you think they can't do the same thing with gaming. I see the warning signs everywhere, but is there really anything we can do?