Industry veteran John Romero, best known for his work at id Software as a designer for Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake and later as the creator of Daikatana, believes PC and mobile are dominating console platforms through price but can’t really see the new wave of VR gaining much traction with most players.

“ With PC you have free-to-play and Steam games for five bucks. The PC is decimating console, just through price.

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Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, at an event marking the addition of his old Apple II Plus computer to the museum's permanent eGameRevolution exhibit, Romero shared his thoughts on how free-to-play continues to shake up the industry.“With PC you have free-to-play and Steam games for five bucks,” said Romero. “The PC is decimating console, just through price. Free-to-play has killed a hundred AAA studios”“It’s a different form of monetization than Doom or Wolfenstein or Quake where that’s free-to-play [as shareware],” said Romero. “Our entire first episode was free – give us no money, play the whole thing. If you like it and want to play more, then you finally pay us. To me that felt like the ultimate fair [model]. I'm not nickel-and-diming you. I didn't cripple the game in any design way.”“Everybody is getting better at free-to-play design, the freemium design, and it’s going to lose its stigma at some point. People will settle into [the mindset] that there is a really fair way of doing it, and the other way is the dirty way. Hopefully that other way is easily noticeable by people and the quality design of freemium rises and becomes a standard. That’s what everybody is working hard on. People are spending a lot of time trying to design this the right way. They want people to want to give them money, not have to. If you have to give money, you’re doing it wrong... For game designers, that’s the holy grail.”Romero went on to highlight the obvious technoligocial advantages of PC over consoles (“With PCs if you want a faster system you can just plug in some new video cards, put faster memory in it, and you'll always have the best machine that blows away PS4 or Xbox One,” he said) although he remains unconvinced that VR headsets are going to make a significant impact.“Before using Oculus , I heard lots of vets in the industry saying this is not like anything we’ve seen before. This is not the crap we saw back in the late ’80s. I was excited to check it out and I was just blown away by just how amazing it was to just be in an environment and moving my head was just like mouse-look. I thought that was really great but when I kind of step back and look at it, I just don’t see a real good future for the way VR is right now. It encloses you and keeps you in one spot – even the Kinect and Move are devices I wouldn’t play because they just tire you out.”“VR is going away from the way games are being developed and pushed as they go back into multiplayer and social stuff. VR is kind of a step back, it's a fad.”“Even though I’m excited about VR and how cool games look, I can’t see it becoming the way people always play games... If you're inside of a cockpit, that’s cool, but if you’re supposed to be running around a world and you can’t physically run but you can look around, it’s a weird disconnect and it doesn’t feel right.”

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