Piracy is still never acceptable. There are worse things on the developers, sure, but that is a sign of bad purchase, not actual developer errors. If you buy a game from a retail store, Steam, or Stardock, it's good.

Please don't say people are dumb or lazy , just because they like consoles or don't build their own PC.

I used to build my own PC, but now I value my time a lot more. I ordered a game rig, pre-built for me with components I chose (with the recommendations of the company). Making a good rig is more complex than people think.

Cooling is critical
Sound insulation
Graphics Card/ChipSet/Firmware/Motherboard/BIOS Combinations
What hard disks you chose for performance. Noise/Heat generated by said components.
Overclocking, risks/benefits
Right OS choice XP Home Pro/Media Centre/Vista?
Burn in stability tests
3D Mark tests

I am currently using an 18month old rig, and it still rocks most people's PCs. The company also ran brun in tests/IO test/3D mark tests etc. and sent me Harcopy/PDF reports of all the tests, along with the testing software so that I could check the veracity of these tests. I can further upgrade it to quad CPU, and also SLI with the latest Nvida card should I chose so. The reason for this is with the assistance of the company I chose a good combo of parts.

This was all done for me, and has saved me a heap of time and hassle, researching, building testing etc etc.

I also own a 360 which I think is a great machine that provides hassle free gaming whith a consistent high level of audio/graphical performance out of the box. It's easy to connect to a 50ich display and my 5.1 audio, it's great to play casualy with friends as well. Console owners are in no way "dumbed down" or lazy, it's simply a consumer choice people make.

I generally use my laptop. The general course of action for desktops is Buy, Replace, Enjoy, where I buy one, take out all but its good parts, put in more fans and a bigger power supply, and replace everything with upgrades.

PC gaming dead ? Never happen for the simple reason that where there is a user base of 500million+ there will always be someone or something that will innovate to tap into it. The nature of the market segment may change, the economics and dynamics will change, for sure, but never write off an empty market segment of 500million, not going to happen.

The driver for the mainstream part of the gaming industry is always how to get the best return on investment made. Use the latest graphics etc and you create a higher perceived value, so the headline price is higher, despite the fact that the amount of effort needed to raise the Game from mundane to superb is far lower than the price hike in relative terms, because the Tools available are ever more efficient.

The margins on the higher end games are far higher because of this. Shifting 2 million units at $45 on a $20 profit margin, bringing in $40m, is a far greater return on investment than shifting 8 million units at $20 on a $5 profit margin also bringing in $40m. The former takes far less effort, smaller infrastructure, lower distribution cost base etc.

PC gaming is a huge market segment serving many different needs and desires in that segment. "One Size doesnt fit all". No Gaming house can meet all of them, each will therefore target a specific segment to get the best return on their investment in their particular circumstances.

Argue until your blue in the face on technology grounds etc, wrong driver, the industry works on getting the best return within the segment it targets. As that segments needs change, or even evaporate, so will the gaming houses shift their strategy or product. In the latter, technology finally comes into it - but only in the guise of how to service the targeted market segment. Technology is not the first and overiding factor, its often the last consideration because technology is a means to an end - not the end in itself, and will only be used to fill the need of the Gaming House to meet its Marget Segment strategy.

A world Wide User base of 500million+ thats not targeted to provide what they need ?? In the Long Term that will Never Happen. When Gaming Houses hit a market segment, it happens because of the Prime Driver Return on Investment, not Technology. The latter enables that Return on Investment, it does not in itself drive it.

Regards
Zy

There will never be a total death, but how long will companies that aren't indies stay in?

There may be 500+ million PCs, but that doesn't mean there are 500+ million PCs that someone will be willing to play a game on. You can't count userbase that way. You can on consoles, because people buy consoles to play games (90% of the time). But most PCs never see anything more than Minesweeper or Solitaire.



That's a flat-out falsehood. Making high-end graphics is more expensive nowadays than it was 5 years ago. It's harder, due to diminished returns on hardware performance and the ever-present danger of falling into the Uncanny Valley. And the cost of graphics is very dependent on the kind of game you're making.

If your game is set in space, with ships and such, then your costs are pretty low. Space is dark, with generally one very bright light source that produces very strong, sharp shadows. And the emptiness of space means that one ship shadowing another is unlikely enough so that you shouldn't bother with it. These all combine to make space-based graphics relatively cheap.

Compare this to a modern FPS game. You need people, and people need animations. You just doubled your art staff right there, because now you need people who can not only model humans in reasonable detail, but animate their motions. Terrain needs to be textured, have appropriate dressing (detritus in cities, etc), and so forth. The more terrain you have, the more art staff/time you need.

Freelancer did that nicely, being a low-requirement space sim. It even won awards for art.

I'd love to see a single fact to back up this idiotic statement. Everything I've seen suggests that while Crysis's initial sales weren't that high, they exceeded sales expectations.

Neither the publisher, NOR the developer expected it to fly off store shelves. They expect it to sale continuously as people upgrade their computers eventually, ie: "Well I finally got a 9800, guess I'll go try Crysis".

Honestly, the stupid things people say.

In fact, here's a link you stupid ignoramuses: http://kotaku.com/351661/crysis-comeback-moves-1-million-copies

Pardon my insults, but stupidity deserves to be insulted.

So basically what you're saying is that consoles are awesome, because they're for 'normal' people who 'have lives', and computers are 'for losers'? You should also mention that reading books is 'too boring' and 'for fags', and TV is clearly better.

I'd love to see how you can argue that 'not caring to learn' about something you have a direct interest in DOESN'T make you stupid, because the internet is clogged with these people. If I didn't care to learn how to type without using shorthand moron-speak like 'u', 'ur', 'ne1', 'm8', etc. that doesn't make me a 'smart person' who just didn't care enough to learn how to type. In fact, the very definition of 'smart' is usually characterized by someone who is quick to learn, and has a lot of knowledge. The antonym of 'smart' being 'stupid'.

99% of the planet doesn't care about Quantum Theory, so I guess that makes Quantum Physicists just as stupid as everyone else.

Are you going to say someone who thinks books are gay and can barely read at a high school level isn't undereducated, ignorant, and stupid?

No, not 'caring' DOES make you stupid, in addition to lazy.

Consoles are better sellers because most of the human population is stupid and lazy. Hell, just look at the 'best games' for consoles - they're the stupidest, most formulaic, unimaginative, dumb-jock-focused games around.

The best analogy with 'console vs. pc' is comparing someone who likes racing to someone who doesn't.

I have a Hyundai Sonata. It doesn't go very fast. It's reliable, but I also don't drive around at 180mph, revving my engine at red lights, or tell people that I do.

Consoles are basically people who go buy a Honda Civic with a big spoiler on the back, drive around letting off the gas and then flooring it so it seems like they have a manual, and then tell people how fast they drive.

Someone who has a serious interest in racing is going to need a good car, and therefore, should have the know-how about maintaining, building, and customizing a car to do so.

As far as racing goes, I'm an idiot. But I also don't PRETEND to be a racer. That is the difference between consoles and PC.

No need to triple post.

All you say, though, is very correct.

Main reasons:

1.) It gets more and more common that you can take 1 - 2 days off just to install and patch a game. (Greatings to Relic!)

2.) Loading times can get longer than used in Amiga times. (Greatings to Relic!)

3.) "Release time = Start of beta phase" seems to apply for most game developers (except maybe Blizzard)

4.) Graphics overshadow gameplay too much (Greatings to Bethesda and Gas powered Games!)

5.) Too many bugs that occur on all machines and not just on 'excentric' hardware. (Greatings to Jowood and Obsidian!)

6.) Too many bugs that never get fixed although they are known and happen on all machines. (Greatings to Jowood)

7.) Game developers seem to love to 'decorate' their homepages with support E-Mail adresses which are directly linked to the trashcan. Usually you never get an answer regardless of what you are asking. (Even if they forgot to add the serial number in the game package) (Greatings to Black Hole, ProFantasy, etc.)

8.) Copy protections with "Kill the OS" side effects. (Greatings to starforce)

9.) Games are released too often in unfinished state. (Developers often blame the producer. However, no producer ever seems to get punished for that. I wonder... do producers stand above the law?!)

Okay, those are just the main reasons...

Bad analogy, you're implying that a driver must be a mechanic. While it might help, it is not necessary.

Way to read emotion-laden ad hominem attacks into a post that didn't actually have any.

Consoles are awesome because they're for people who love videogames and don't love computers. It's a pretty large set of people. There is no rational reason why somebody who doesn't really care about computers beyond the minimum needed to web surf, read email, and use MS Office should be barred from playing videogames, and thanks to consoles, there is no practical reason for it either. If all you want to do is play games, then a console is a great choice. Gaming PC's are only better if you enjoy working with computers in its own right. There is no valid cause for derision on either side of this great divide.

Modern operating systems, mostly starting with MacOS I believe (could be wrong) have lowered the barriers to entry for basic computer use to the point where just about anybody can use them for the bare essentials with very little understanding required of their internal workings. In other words, for things like email and web browsing, they are appliances. Consoles do the same for gaming.

Gaming is not, and there is no legitimate reason why it should be, the exclusive domain of computer lovers. Things like pc component selection, high performance cooling options, and overclocking are the exclusive domain of computer lovers. The skill sets required to excel at gaming are almost completely disjoint from the skill sets required to excel at pc optimization. It strikes me as surreal that anybody would think that there needs to be a correlation.

In other words, not sharing your particular interests doesn't make console gamers stupid, any more than your not sharing their particular interests makes *YOU* stupid.

Consoles are better sellers because they're the path of least resistance. They're the most approachable and most accessible. They're also standard. Devs can assume that one xbox is like any other xbox. It's easy to develop for because you don't need to worry about multitudes of gaming environments.

Personally, I strongly favour PC gaming over console gaming and miss the days of GOOD PC gaming abundance. However, it's wrong to say console players are stupid and lazy. We (PC gamers) value learning about computers and tuning it to run the games we want to play. Most people do not value that. They value being able to very easily play a game.

Your argument about Quantum Physicists (a population minority) misses the point of the person you were quoting. The poster was not saying that people who care about computers (a population minority) are stupid, but that it's NOT stupid to be uninterested in that.

It's obvious you're very bitter about the state of gaming on consoles and PC. I will agree that mainstream games are tending towards a flash over substance trend. However, complaining about this is like complaining about blockbuster movies (high budget, high expected revenue, dumbed down). Companies are more willing to pour money onto a title if they know it's going to get a lot of sales. The only way it'll get the sales numbers they want is for them to cater to MAINSTREAM and NOT NICHE.

They sold a million after 4 months. Halo 3 eclipsed that on preorders alone. They both cost approximately the same to make. Which is the better return on investment?



You're mingling my words with yours.

You are the one saying that there are "smart people" (ie: PC gamers) and there are "stupid people" (ie: console gamers). My rebuttal is that people are not "stupid" for taking the path of least resistance. I'm not putting people on a continuum of "smart" and "stupid".

Furthermore, knowledge of computers and the ridiculous rain dance necessary to make many PC games work does not make one smart. It makes one knowledgeable. And it only makes them knowledgeable in a specific field. People who know how to do whatever nonsense is necessary to make a PC game work aren't smart; they're just determined.



It's simple; they're not interested in a specific game here. This isn't a person who says, "I'm going to play Crysis no matter what." This is a person who says, "I want to play some entertaining videogames." That might include Crysis, but if Crysis is too high maintenance for them, they'll move on to something else. That is, for them, Crysis is not significantly better than Halo 3. So if it takes 10x the effort to play Crysis than Halo 3, why would it ever be reasonable to play Crysis over Halo 3? And after they're done with Halo 3, it'll be some other console game that they'd prefer over the 10x effort needed to play Crysis.

It doesn't make you stupid because not being obsessed with one specific game to the point where you will expend huge efforts to play it is not stupidity. It's simply an alternate set of priorities.



You only say that because you don't like them. You have no objective defense of that statement.



How can they be punished for it? What crime did the Producer commit? Releasing a movie with 10 minutes obviously cut out of it isn't a crime; it's just releasing a bad movie. The problem is that people will pay for it anyway.



That analogy is broken. The first problem with the analogy is that it's not even true for regular people. Maybe 20% of the population fits into your analogy. The rest are just people who want to get from place to place. It's a false dichotomy.

Further, people with an interest in racing don't necessarily have, or even want, cars that are good at racing. Their interest can easily be in watching racing, not participating in it.

Lastly, it doesn't even fit gaming because it suggests that PC gaming is more serious than console gaming because it is harder. Which is rather ludicrous.

PCgaming is growing double digits each year, I do not know what your definition for dyzing is, but it sure as hell does not fit into my own understanding of the word.

Comparing Halo3 to Crysis doesn’t make much sense. First of all Halo3 is huge IP, it’s not like any developer can expect their games to sell like Halo3 does, it just doesn’t happen often. Second while they both costed the same amount of money to make(and Crytek still built it cheap, I mean... Stranglehold and Lost Planet aren’t anywhere near as graphically impressive as Crysis, they’re also much shorter and yet they costed as much as Crysis, even Halo3 isn’t anywhere near as detailed graphically as Crysis and yet it costed about the same to make)( Halo3 costed many times more to advertise. While almost all Crysis advertising was done by Nvidia, EA and Crytek hardly spend money on it. Also.. Halo3 is just a game and that’s all, Crysis isn’t just a game for Crytek, it’s also a huge showcase of their engine power, it makes sense on PC, because it offers something beyond capabilities of other engines, on console hardware all Crytek could truly introduce is new version of UE3.0, why learn how to work on new engine if it doesn’t really offer much of an advantage over UE3.0. Also.. you’re forgetting that Halo is a MS’ owned IP, first party games are quite different from 3rd party ones.
And last thing, while Halo3’s budget is pretty much standart on console market, Crysis’ budget is a huge rarity in PCgaming. Sure PCgames might not sell as good as console games on average, but they also cost a lot less to make and many many times less to advertise than console games. Currently on consoles without at least $12-15million dev budget and another $10mln on advertising you can forget about having a decent sucecess. More and more often console game has to sell at least 1mln copies just to make any profit

Where are your numbers to support this? In the $18.65 billion dollar industry that is electronic gaming, last year PCs FELL from $970 million to $910 million. That is pretty much the opposite of growth.

WWW Link

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If you are an investor in these sorts of industries... and in charge of deciding WHO gets the $8 million gamble to make that next game, the numbers don't look good to bet on the PC right now.

~ Wyndstar

FYI "QFT" stands for "quote for truth". You didn't quote anything.

People have been complaining about the death of PC gamers for over a decade. It won't happen.

PC gaming has nothing to do with enthusiasts and wanting to tweak your machine. Plenty of people game on sub-optimal, old machines. PC games tend to "just work" too - they just take a minutiae of effort other than "durp i put disk in machine". I can't see someone that would prefer a console to a PC based on not wanting to run an installation wizard as anything but lazy/stupid.

It was the second post in the thread. I was incorporating by reference the entire first post.

That PC gaming will never die completely I agree with. That doesn't mean the dearth of lots of high-quality PC titles in a variety of generes every month is representative of a healthy market. Money matters in business, and money in PC gaming seems to be more and more scarce.

I'm interested both as a gamer, and as an investor.

How are you going to convince me what the return on my investment is going to be if I put millions behind your development house to make a game? The numbers in PC gaming are falling for many reasons, but I specifically think the OPs points of a lack of hardware standard and releasing games with high hardware requirements are to blame for the poor sales numbers. I don't think it has anything to do with piracy, which is one of the big bogeymen you hear about at conventions when people talk about what is wrong.

Why do they talk about what is wrong? Money. There is lots and lots of it out there for entertainment, and yet the small trickle of money that gets sent PC gaming's way is actually declining during a period of unprecedented growth for video gaming overall. If you take out the money machine that is WoW PC gaming profits were just pathetic last year.

Of course, such analysis is not going to be readily received on a message board for a PC game (which I love) in a genre not typically appealing to the masses (too bad for everyone else). PCs games are my baby too. That doesn't mean I'm going to let my emotional attachment blind me to the economics.

Online subscriptions and transactions are part of the story... and solution. But numbers released about such "alternative" forms of distribution still suggest that it is a drop in the bucket compared to retail numbers. And PCs have over the last two years essentially lost the retail wars. If the current trend continues I wouldn't be surprised to see PC game shelf space (which is expensive for any retailer) to disappear.

~ Wyndstar

I will have to agree that computer gaming is dying slowly. It just cost to much money to keep a computer at peak performance. Also much more difficult to write software for the thousands of combinations of comuputer hardware. I built a computer when AGP 8x was first introduced. It cost me 2500 now time to spend another 2500.....nah I can get All 3 consoles for half the price and console games for the most part work. But I really miss computer gaming.

the lins you provide have have two problems, they are only from US and only from retail. Unlike on consoles retail US market is not the end of all for the whole pcgaming industry. Most pc games sell couple times better in Europe than in US. Last year was a good example. It took CnC3 10months to reach 300K in US, while it surpassed million in a month worldwide, STALKER is already close to 2mln copies sold and it did not even sell 150K in US And ignoring the online gives you false image of the whole market, as online is the main source of growth in pcgaming currently. THose NPD numbers do not take into account STEAM, WOW or stuff like Stardock downloadable games. WoW alone has well over 2,5 mln subcribers in US. That alone brings over 400 million dollars annualy, which is almost half of what NPD reports of pcgaming, HALF.. and it gets ignored by NPD. You see now how innacurate NPD numbers are? NPD even knows and admits it themselves as they stated people play more pcgames than ever before and they will try to track online in 2008

DFC Intelligence unlike NPDs tracks both online and retail and does it worldwide

WWW Link
Specifically, Stude cited a report by DFC Intelligence stating that PC gaming grew 12 percent in profit last year with an estimated forecast of 14 percent growth in 2008. Stu

And if I was in charge of deciding WHO gets the $8 million gamble to make that next game I would bet on PC game, because this money is way to little to dream about success in console market

Wel, you don't have much choice. I mean there aren't many console devs left that would accept your money. Indepednent developers (I don't mean indie, just ones that are owned by their employees instead of being owned by pig publisher or other company) are quickly going extinct in console market. They either die or get bought out by publishers.
There are literaly hundreds of independent pc developers around and most of them make profit (they're independent afterall, if they don't make money they go bancrupt,they don't have plushy publisher to soak the damage for the). You rarely see pc studios closing down,

Ironically, the PC developers who get closed down historically were the most highly successful.

I mean, sheesh, Black Isle? Who the hell saw THAT coming?