Firaxis man backs PC

Celebrated PC developer Firaxis is "not at all" concerned about the prospects for the platform in the face of the arrival of the next-gen consoles, director and senior producer Barry Caudill has told GamesIndustry.biz in an interview.

According to Caudill, the PC platform will continue to thrive for a number of reasons - most notably, the "broad range" it offers, which gives it unique potential in terms of the emergence of new companies and concepts.

"The PC provides this really excellent way to have a broad range," he explained. "If you're going to have the game equivalent of an independent film company, that self-publishes and all of that stuff, they're not going to do it on console - they're going to do it on PC."

Caudill also emphasised the fact that PC hardware will rapidly outstrip the next-gen systems in price / performance terms over the coming years - and claimed that much of the gloom over the PC market in recent years has been based on incorrect statistics.

"A lot of the sounding of the death knell for PCs comes from, 'Well, the numbers are down,'" he told us, "and they just recently realised that they weren't counting MMOs or casual games in their numbers. Once they find a way to correctly account for those, people will be astounded at the numbers that are actually happening on the PC right now."

Caudill was speaking to GamesIndustry.biz about Firaxis' recent collaboration with independent developer Firefly on the forthcoming extension to the Civilization franchise, CivCity, on which he worked as executive producer.