The gaming year 2015 in review
A good year
Last year I started the "Year in review" article by sharing with you just how difficult it had been to reach an agreement over which game deserved to win our Game of the Year award. As a gaming year, 2014 was pretty flat and unexciting - and our team's votes were all over the place as a result.
By contrast, 2015 featured an abundance of standout games. It should have been easy. And for our top three, it was - we were nearly unanimous. But that's where it ended. Choosing just one to take the prize of top game actually turned out to be even more difficult than last year.
In any other year
The RPG category was especially strong. Pillars of Eternity proved without a shadow of a doubt that the death of the isometric game world had been grossly overstated. In any other year, Obsidian Entertainment's spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate would have trampled its competition, but had to compete with Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The latter game raised the bar for role-playing games to such dizzying heights that even the otherwise magnificent Fallout 4 felt dated.
But Pillars of Eternity wasn't the only game with something to prove. A small studio with the grand name of Colossal Order showed the gaming behemoth Electronic Arts how you to make a city builder that is enjoyable, ambitious and, above all, actually works upon launch. Their first foray into city builders, Cities: Skylines is the new king of the genre and it may well reign supreme until the turn of the decade. I have a feeling Electronic Arts is going to bury Simcity for a while. Their fate in the franchise - and in gaming for that matter - has been shaky. 2013's Simcity debacle may well have put the nail in its coffin.
The cemetery is getting crowded too. It's not just Electronic Arts that has been making a habit of burying PC franchises. Gaming moguls Activision, Electronic Arts and Microsoft have all dropped the ball on PC gaming and are all banking on the mobile space to keep them afloat after dedicated consoles like the Playstation and Xbox become a thing of the past. But the mobile gaming population behaves differently from those playing games on more traditional platforms. On average, only 2% of mobile gamers will ever actually shell out money for a 'free-to-play' game, and 80% of the mobile games fail to achieve more than 100 downloads. Traditional publishers are having a tough time keeping up with newcomers such as King (Candy Crush) and Supercell (Clash of Clans). Perhaps Microsoft's $2.5 billion purchase of Mojang (Minecraft, one of the bestselling mobile games for years) wasn't such a stretch after all.
A fling, but nothing serious
Looking ahead, the smart money is on a multi-platform strategy. The even smarter money is on a multi-platform strategy with PC and Steam at the heart. PC gamers are loyal and informed gamers who keep track of sequels and spinoffs in a way that mobile publishers could only dream of. We're also in it for the long haul. When gaming consoles arrived on the scene, many of us considered those to be simply an additional way of enjoying games and the same happened when mobile games hit mainstream success.
Sure, we'll have an occasional fling with an Xbox, we may even go steady with a Playstation, but those will inevitably start to look wrinkly. And when their manufacturers dangle shiny new replacements in front of our noses, we'll no doubt sample their wares - the gaming flesh is weak - but we always stay true to our beloved PC as our primary gaming platform.
And why?
Because The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is at its most beautiful on a PC, Fallout plays better on the PC than any console, and playing Cities: Skylines would be a laughable proposition with a controller. And when we're done enjoying what the publisher has created for us, the community improves upon the games with mods.
PC as a core strategy
Long after the App Store is a ghost town, long after consoles have given way to non-dedicated platforms, the PC will live on. The PC is, was and always will be the very core of the industry, the nexus from which all other platforms were born and where creativity peaks. It is here where publishers must build, renew and nurture their franchises. If they won't, companies like Colossal Order and Obsidian Entertainment will use their newfound success, expand into other territories and run off with the prize.
Sergio Brinkhuis
Editor in Chief