What Modern Warfare 2 Teaches Us

If you haven’t been living in a cave in northern China, you might have heard about a little known game called Modern Warfare 2. The follow up sequel to 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has caused a lot of stir in the gaming community. This game has the power to make all other developers cringe at the thought of releasing a title at the same time. But what’s more interesting is the development surrounding the PC side of the game.

MW2 was released on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 simultaneously on November 10th. Call of Duty originated as another WWII shooter on the PC but gained fame with its addictive multiplayer and interesting narratives. But it wasn’t until Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare did we see the rabid fan following grow. Arguably, the fame Activision and Infinity Ward saw at the hands of Modern Warfare came by way of the console users. According to NPD, U.S. video game console software sales reached $8.9 billion (189.0 million units), PC game sales hit $701.4 million (29.1 million units) at the end of 2008. Granted that NPD isn’t the most reliable source of information and that they only track a minority of distribution methods (ie. not e-tailers or digital distribution) but this still gives us a good indication of the disparity between console sales and PC gaming sales.

Why am I fanning the war between PCs and consoles again? It’s because of a post by Ars Technica this past week outlining what Infinity Ward is doing with the PC version of quite possibly the largest FPS release this year. PC fans were first alerted to the impending doom when Infinity Ward announced that they were not going to have dedicated server support for the PC version of the game. Dedicated servers have been a staple in multiplayer PC games since as early as 1995 with the release of Doom by id Software. To be fair, Doom started out as a LAN only multiplayer game but with the availability of in-home internet, servers soon followed. In comparison, the console market did not receive online multiplayer until the release of Sega’s Dreamcast system in 2000.

However, since that initial announcement, PC gamers have been nervous to the idea of Infinity Ward’s attitude towards the PC version of the game. Rumors of delays to the PC version were abound and then Infinity Ward held a public web-chat with BestBuy on November 3rd where all was revealed. To sum it up, the PC version of the game will have a maximum of 18 players per map, no console commands support (which means no tweaking by activating the in-game console), inability to kick players in ranked matches, and all online matches will be peer-to-peer hosted with a five second delay between host switches. If you’re a PC gamer and have been through the era of Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament, you probably spat coffee all over your keyboard. To draw an analogy that non-PC gamers will understand, Infinity Ward is selling you a car that has five seats but you can only carry two passengers at a time, no seat adjustments, no horn to honk, and you can only drive the car during rush hour with no access to freeways. Do you see the picture now?

I’ve been having a Facebook conversation about this for the past few days (which prompted the writing of this article) and a commenter asked the question of whether consoles will be able to keep up with the technical advancements of the PC in a few years, especially if the new console life cycle is over eight years. The answer to that question lies in the direction that Infinity Ward has chosen to take. If the NPD data is to be believed then what dictates the flow of innovation will be the platform that sells – which will be consoles. That doesn’t bode well for PC gamers. Because instead of gettig graphics, physics, and rendering innovations, we get Natal. Because of what Nintendo achieved with the Wii, it shows developers that polygons doesn’t sell titles, gimmicks do.

Now I’m sure MW2 will break millions of sales in the first day and will most likely go into the books as the title that breaks all of Halo’s records. But I would gladly trade all that mainstream success if only we could get PC support back. So what is the PC gamer supposed to do? Personally, I’ve relegated FPS duty to my PS3. The reason is because of the free online, more mature players, and Sony’s support for third party controllers which allow for a near PC experience. But all that good still doesn’t replace 64 player multiplayer. Hopefully Valve and DICE will continue to fight the good fight and not give into this 9vs9 crap.