ABSTRACT
In the meantime, while the three console manufacturers continued to focus on living-room experiences, fans lamented the supposed death of PC gaming. Games like Halo and Call of Duty had moved the traditional first-person shooter (FPS) and action markets towards the consoles, but millions of new players flocked to PC-based online experiences. In particular, 13 million of them happily shelled out $15 a month to Blizzard to play World of Warcraft , and hundreds of thousands more subscribed to a half dozen or so of the lesssuccessful Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. Most of these MMOs danced happily in the wake of early innovators like Ultima Online , Meridian 59 , and EverQuest , and even more ancient MUDs, MOOs, and BBS games, forgotten by all but the old sages of game design. The death of PC gaming turned out to have been exaggerated, and the PC remained a viable platform for game development, albeit one that now needed to offer a different type of product with a different business model. The war for the hearts, minds, andmore important-the pocketbooks of gamers seemed likely to settle into a comfortable four-way victory in which console manufacturers competed with one another for an expanding market and PC gamers subscribed to one or two of the big MMOs.
