8 Realms starts you off with a small village under threat from barbarian hordes and allows you to develop and protect this settlement until it becomes a vast metropolis. Following a gradual timeline of technological progression you’ll be gathering resources, constructing buildings, researching technology and, of course, occasionally commanding troops against those who wish your growing civilisation harm. You’ll always be working towards something, whether it’s micro-managing the income of resources or building and researching something specific. The goal is to be prosperous and maintain it; as such it’s a long process.

However, 8 Realms is designed to be played in short bursts then left to run in the background. Building, researching and gathering resources takes time, and in 8 Realms case, is measured in real time. Smaller, simpler endeavours will take mere minutes to complete; meanwhile grander goals can takes several hours. It’s a great way of pacing the experience. Development is steady to give you a sense of progression and satisfaction whilst also introducing elements slowly to maintain your interest over a long period of time.

My time with it proved to be hard to put down. The initial quests spend a good 45 minutes with the basic tasks of setting up a civilisation and completing the tutorials. After which the quests shifted to tasks that took half an hour or longer to complete, allowing me to leave it be and return later. Without a doubt 8 Realms succeeded in pulling me back periodically over a week of play. Whether following quests dished out by a charming villager or chasing my own agenda, days soon revolved around when I needed to return to my growing empire so not to waste time idling.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EguWCIaKiUY

To aid with time management, gems allow players to buy boosts to quicken the time it takes to complete certain things. These gems could either be bought with real money or earned in-game. However, one issue did begin to grate on the otherwise positive experience. There is a significant delay with the interface. Initially it was an inconvenience during the tutorial quests but it became hugely frustrating later on. Coming back to your civilisation to quickly issue new commands was a much slower affair than it should be, contradicting the very nature of the quick dip in and out premise. In fact the interface as a whole suffers. The play screen is limited to a box in the centre of the screen and menu boxes are intrusive. It’s cluttered but certainly not a game breaker.

Indeed 8 Realms is fun and compelling with a free to play model that doesn’t punish non-paying player. The slow interface is an issue that needs attention but otherwise it’s shaping up to a great strategy/management title and is well worth checking out.

You can play 8 Realms for free here.

As Nintendo know all too well, the biggest gains to be made in the market aren’t from persuading gamers to swap product allegiances, or buying up platform exclusives, or developing award winning content. The serious profits are from the casual and non-gamers; the Brain Training Grans, the EA Sports Active Dads, the Farmville on Facebook Fans. Instead of requiring dedicated hardware to access content, i.e. a home console, all potential players need is a computer and an internet connection, something that in the western world, we have in abundance. Tie this into insidious methods of viral product marketing, such as Mafia Wars auto-posting to the wall of your Facebook page, and you have a lucrative combination of untapped market, ease of access and an abundance of brand exposure.

It does.

For a totally ununified platform with different hardware load outs from machine to machine, developing for PC offers some interesting benefits that can level the playing field. Taking Blizzard’s approach to World Of Warcraft and building a title that can run on practically any system out there, yet remain visually appealing because of art style, is useful to game developers for two reasons. To begin with it means that a wide range of players can access content produced by the team, you don’t need an Alienware gaming rig to just while away a few hours with friends, creating a larger potential market. Second, production costs of making the game in the first place are much lower and without the need for that next leap in graphical fidelity, dev teams can concentrate on putting out the far more profitable expansion packs.

There are other benefits of course, there are many superb, PC native middleware tools and SDKs to get game creation software into the hands of budding bedroom programmers. Epic recently even went so far as to release the Unreal Development Kit completely free of charge for non-commercial use. This abundance of tools for those eager to break into the industry creates a lush, fertile environment of smaller, more experimental games, just look at the blossoming indie scene at the moment and you’ll see that nearly all the games there start out in development for the humble personal computer.

It might not look pretty, but it gets the job done.

Distribution models can also deviate wildly from the industry standard of ‘create a game, release for download’. Facebook games, Jagex and Free Realms are all products of companies who realise that when you have a permanent online identity tied to the play structure of a title, the potential of piracy is almost zero. Likewise the payment methods don’t necessarily need to conform to boxed releases; lower start-up, maintenance and distribution costs mean games can not only be inexpensive to purchase, they can be free, with ad support, micro transactions and pay-what-you-feel models a distinct possibility moving forward through the coming decade. These models are only really possible on, you guessed it, PC.

The ‘traditional’ PC gaming that was so popular ten years or so ago, may as well be dead, we probably won’t see a return to the keyboard and mouse as a viable platform for the ‘hardcore’ market. However the home (or office, or university, or library) computer may still be the most lucrative and experimental area in gaming’s very bright future. PC gaming is dead, long live PC gaming!