When will Destiny come to PC?
The Spy believes that it is important to know the difference between a conspiratorial secret society and a club for people who wear the same hat. One is a way for lonely and isolated people to find a sense of belonging, complimenting each other’s fine hooded cowls while believing themselves to be different to everybody else in the world; the other is a club for people who wear the same hat. Yet this has been a fractious month for the many special-hat-wearing societies of the games community, who have turned upon each other with a manic fervor normally reserved for the people who take to YouTube to explain that the Moon doesn’t exist.
The Spy knows that there are, in reality, only two secret societies you need to worry about: the Deathless Lizardmen of Planet X and Activision’s shareholders. Also, EA’s shareholders. All right, fine. All shareholders.
Most of the irrational things you’ll see in this business are done to satisfy that ever-hungering maw. Just as it was when ancient gods loomed over blood-stained ziggurats, men are driven to do extraordinary things to please their stakeholding masters. We’re shielded from this somewhat on the PC, where a history of selfpublishing by privately owned indie developers has created a kind of Babylon. And as far as The Spy is aware, nothing bad ever happened to Babylon, right?
Nonetheless, hear these words when you see a baffling exclusivity deal: ‘probably for the shareholders’. Hear them again when a game costs $60 from a publisher’s download store, and when a game takes a year to stagger from Xbox 360 to PC. GTA V is finally making the last part of that belated journey, arriving on PC on 27 January, several months after the next-gen console version appears on the busiest release week of the year in November.
Considering that Assassin’s Creed: Unity is out the week before, there’s a new Call of Duty that month, and
Dragon Age: Inquisition is coming out around the same
The Earth will shake and all of its money will fly into space
time, The Spy was concerned this would’ve result in an epochal sundering of the world’s wallets, so the wait doesn’t hurt. The Earth will shake and all of its money will fly into space, where it will form a new world in the form of a glittering ring; only Silicon Valley executives will live on this ring.
Microsoft was certainly not thinking about glittering space rings made of money when it decided to prevent its own magical space ring from releasing all over the PC. The Spy regrets that sentence, but is sticking with it. Halo: The Master Chief Collection bundles four prior
Halo games in remastered form into a parcel that would be absolutely perfect for our platform, and yet Microsoft has ignored The Spy’s ongoing pleas to see sense. The latest reason is that the box set concerns “Master Chief’s journey on Xbox One,” according to 343 Industries manager Bonnie Ross, a sentiment so robotic it may as well have been sung through a vocoder during the bridge of a Daft Punk song.
Halo’s spiritual successor Destiny— doing its part to instigate Money-geddon from as early as September— has been held back from the PC for marginally more substantial reasons. Bungie cites the single shared online universe as the reason, claiming that bringing it to four consoles was already sufficient challenge. The Spy suspects there’s another side to this, however: balance. Ever since pad-wielding Dreamcast owners were pitched against PC players in Quake III, console developers have been gun-shy about letting their audience anywhere near somebody armed with a mouse and keyboard. “So have separate servers for the PC!” The Spy hears you cry. Well, yes. You’re right. A certain amount of the world’s sense flew up into the sky with all of the money, however. Spy out.