When building my PC, I built it with the intention of being able to play every game. I was excited to belong to the PC club and join the community of hardcore gamers. You can do almost anything on a PC… Except for play games exclusive to certain consoles. Exclusivity is understandable, but is becoming increasingly frustrating.
Recently my favorite group of developers, The Chinese Room, announced the release of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The Chinese Room is an award-winning developing team who takes great care in making visual stunning games so everyone was thrilled to see that they had put a lot of effort into making Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture absolutely beautiful. This game was originally supposed to be for PC, and was assumed to be the spiritual predecessor of Dear Esther (I wrote a review on that beautiful “game”, which you can view here).
Originally I found out the bad news via GameSpot on Twitter. I follow The Chinese Room, and they retweeted a post that GameSpot made about the new trailer released. “PS4 exclusive game Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture gets a stunning new trailer,” it read. My heart sank, not just because of the title error, but because it said the dreaded word “exclusive”. The trailer was absolutely beautiful, but what little feeling I had after Konami’s betrayal was crushed.
I had seen that word before when they announced Bloodborne. After the Bloodborne incident, the word exclusive became a word that I loathed. It broke my little gamer heart. I mean, after the whole Konami incident, how could us gamers take any more heart break?
I understand that games are ridiculously expensive to make, and that it takes up a big chunk of a developers life and funds to create a game. I can’t explain how much I appreciate these small teams for making such beautiful things and really giving up their life for a time just to make customers happy.
What bothered me in this instance was the fact that it was announced for PC, was a spiritual predecessor of a PC game, and was ultimately taken away from us. I tweeted The Chinese Room asking them why they did this and their response was simple: “Lots of reasons. We do our bet. Making games is expensive and we are a tiny team. Wish people would try to understand this!”
I do understand, fully. Team size and funds are huge, and The Chinese Room isn’t a huge company like our overlords Bethesda and Sony. However, it isn’t fair to giveth and then taketh away. This should have been considered in the original planning of the game and is unfair to us fans who follow the game from day one with the promise of a game we too can play.
I guess it is time to finally give in and buy a console after all.
*This is not the opinion of GameGravy as a whole… It is simply the opinion of one heartbroken young woman who loves the games The Chinese Room creates. If I had the money to give them in order to make it PC playable, I would do so, and still buy a PS4. Note that SCE Santa Monica Studio is also a developer on this game.
