Ten Dollars for Equality

As you may or may not have heard, Activision wants to price the next entry-level CoD at $60. Yes, fellow PC gamers, they want us to pay what consolers shell out without question for no reason other than the fact that they want us to. Naturally, it seems many are up in arms about this.

“What’s the big damn deal?” you ask. “It’s only $10 more for a game that’s guaranteed to be at least as good as CoD4.”

Yes, that is certainly one way of looking at it. However, consider this — at its core CoD4 is not nearly as good as most people think. Oh, sure, it’s good, and even I can recognize that, but it’s not good in the way that a cold beer after a long day at work is good. It’s not good like taking a girl out and getting your snog on afterward. Yes, CoD4 boasts a very enjoyable and well put together single-player experience and provides a multiplayer game that thousands upon thousands have spent many hours playing.

However, if you look past all the glitz and glamor it’s not hard to see a flawed inner core. The heart of CoD4 is a console game ported to PC. Anyone of decent skill will tell you game is not balanced for PC play, and this is mostly because the weapons and gameplay elements were designed and balanced in and around an environment in which sticky crosshairs and auto-aim play a huge role. The evidence is everywhere — the G3 and G36C are hardly competitors, the M16A4 is not overpowered as so many console enthusiasts have been whining for the past nearly two years, the shotguns fail to impress, the sniper rifles are only effective on a handful of maps (even then an assault rifle with Deep Impact will net you a better score 95% of the time), and most of the remaining weapons are useless fluff. True balance is something of which the PC version of CoD4 has little.

But we happily paid $50 for our beloved console port because, well, CoD used to be and was supposed to be a PC series. Little did we know we were buying into a sad realm in which PC gaming is no longer a factor in the development of cross-platform games. We are, rather unfortunately, a mere afterthought. Just follow the money — the real profit is in the consoles, so why pay us any mind at all?

It’s not just about balance, however. By now we’re all intimately familiar with those four extra maps we got in a map pack not too terribly long ago. What you may not know is that we almost never got them. That’s right — IW was perfectly okay with never releasing those maps for us PC gamers because they knew we wouldn’t pay for them. And why would we? True PC game developers have been releasing free content for their games for years and years. It was one of the bonuses of going the PC route that wasn’t afforded to consoles until Xbox Live and similar services showed up. Releasing free downloadable content is and always has been expected; why should we pay extra for a measly four maps? Especially when companies like Valve and Epic have made it a habit to release huge amounts of content for free simply to support the game and its players.

In contrast IW wasn’t too keen on letting us play these apparently awesome maps unless someone footed the bill. That task fell to NVIDIA, a company who proved that they were pretty damned awesome dudes when they “sponsored” the release of the map pack on PC. By “sponsored” I of course mean “paid for.” Yes, you have NVIDIA to thank for every sniper headshot you’ve pulled off on Creek and every spammed machine gun round that find its way into your chest through the worthless cover on Killhouse. This is why we received the map pack many months after the console players were already enjoying them — IW was going to keep the maps to themselves until NVIDIA showed up. Which brings us to my ultimate point…

If we’re going to be paying a console price for our PC (console) game, will we be treated as equals?

At $60 we are paying just as much as any console player, so I tend to believe we ought not be completely shunned this go ’round. Will IW put any effort whatsoever into properly balancing the next CoD for PC? When map packs and updates are released will we find them available right alongside their console counterparts? If not, why the fuck not? And why in hell should we pay IW extra money to get boned once again?

Because that is the will of corporate whores. I know in my heart that the PC version of the game will get no better treatment than CoD4 did. From a purely business perspective it’s a waste of time and money — the game sold millions as it was even if its multiplayer was extremely iffy on the balance. Most players are fucking terrible at the game anyway; balance isn’t something 90% of the players will ever inherently understand or notice. I mean, there are still a ton of people whining about Juggernaut simply because they cannot understand gameplay balance. Additionally, of all those fucking terrible players, very few of them would ever pay extra money for a map pack. It’s easy to justify such a purchase on a console due a lack of piracy and the pseudo transparency of buying things with “points.” But a map pack isn’t something anyone on a PC will pay for. Ever. As a result, IW has no reason to release the maps to us without some random third party “sponsoring” their release to get their name out there.

It’s a win for both IW and whomever decides to pony up the cash. But it’s always us lowly PC gamers suffering in the end.

There’s another consequence of this extra $10 — if the game is anywhere near as successful as CoD4 at this price, you can rest assured that all future PC games for any publisher will sport a $60 price tag as well. PC gaming is already plagued with DRM and steadily shorter, more dumbed down, and increasingly forgettable games. The last thing we need is to pay extra for such mediocrity.