Tilted Mill's Chris Beatrice on Hinterland on Big Download is a Q&A discussing Hinterland, Tilted Mill's upcoming strategic role-playing game, while also touching on other projects and the current landscape of PC gaming. It's that last topic that kicks off the conversation, as Chris offers his upbeat take on the state of PC gaming as long as the right approach is taken:

I guess it's hard if you are determined to compete for gaming or shelf space in AAA PC gaming, which granted, is where most of us have been competing for years. There are some great games and franchises that do this, obviously, but there are also a whole lot of opportunities for a really wide variety of fun, innovative and affordable PC games that get skipped because of the focus on the larger titles. The main thing that has changed in the past several years is that big budget PC games don't dominate the traditional retail space – while at the same time, digital distribution is finally starting to come into its own, and also there are great third party technical solutions available as well. When we started in 2001, this was not the case. In general it would take several million dollars to develop a top notch 3d engine from scratch (and then you often find you need to reinvent the wheel with each subsequent game), and then you'd need to get (and hold onto) retail shelf space for a long time, and sell one million+ units just to break even. This is not the right paradigm for a huge swath of the gaming audience, including the surge in 'casual gamers' which has been extremely successful despite ignoring the traditional AAA gaming space. A few traditional PC games will do that, sure, but most won't, but that does not mean they lack an audience, or should not be made available.