QFT.

~ Wyndstar

Two words: ITS NOT

This is not remotely true, at least not according to the white paper I've read on the topic.

The number of "new" top of the line computers in use is somewhere between 5 and 10 million. The number of "old" or "average" or "non-gaming" computers in use is between 300 million and 500 million.

Everyone plays games.

The problem is the gaming magazines and developers mostly use the newer, gaming computers. And they want to be rock stars. Read:
WWW Link

Just the first post for Draginol's take on exactly this situation.

~ Wyndstar

My mom bought her last computer out of sysreq frustration with some Sims thing or other. All she got was a different set of problems.

I vote to slow the whole cycle down by at least 50%. Give the devs and engineers time to clean up after the managers and marketers, then put stuff on the market.

I care little for graphics either, gameplay, plot and AI is everything. Graphics are nice, but not important, and with some of the newer games can actually pose a problem to new relatively expensive computers, so they actually become something negative.

It's not dying.... really.

Digital distribution is bigger now than it ever was and will continue to grow. When you see alot of those cries that PC gaming is dying they are not taking this into account.

It is changing, and I dont think for the worse to be honest...

The system requirements thing and piracy contributes but creative developers can get around this..

It's only dying if you only count boxes sold in Gamestop. If you add in download sales and MMO subscriptions, the picture changes a lot.

Why is StarDock, for example "indie" rather than "commercial"? Because they don't produce several games a year? Well, neither does Valve or Blizzard; does that make them "indie"?

Unless you're talking about non-profit gaming, it's hard to draw a real demarcation line between "indie" developers who get paid and "commercial" developers who get paid. They're all getting paid from us, the gamer.

What's happening in the PC industry is that many of the high-end PC game developers are trying to be console developers. Console games have bigger budgets, greater requirements with regard to craftsmanship (GC2's incessant UI oddities would not be acceptable on a console, for example. Console gamers are a lot less willing to slog through nonsense to play games), and so forth. So the greater expense of console games is brought to PC games. What isn't brought are the things that PC gamers need: a mouse-driven UI, typical PC game graphical features, etc.

And then there's World of Warcraft. MMOs in general, but especially WoW. For a gamer who has maybe 25 hours a month to devote to gaming, paying $15 a month for all of that time doesn't sound like that bad of a deal. After all, most $50 games don't last 25 hours, and only a very few last a comparable 67 hours. Well, that's 25 gamer-hours that are not going to be spent on other games. In many ways, the time-hogginess of MMOs is what makes them detrimental to other kinds of games. It's really the kind of game that you can (theoretically) play forever.

What is really happening is re-specialization. Once upon a time, there were console developers and PC developers, and they really had little to do with one another. PC games were made by PC developers and console games were made by console developers. However, as console's progressed in hardware, they became capable of playing games that were formerly only doable on PCs. FPSs, for example. So many PC developers had good reason to jump ship onto the larger console market. That leaves room for new PC developers (StarDock, et. al) to appear and make their mark on the now smaller PC games industry.

Look at the most successful PC developers: Valve and Blizzard. What do they have in common? A complete, uncompromising focus on the needs of PC gamers. And one of the biggest needs is to be able to run the games that they play. HL2 can be run on almost anything, as can WoW, WC3, and anything else Blizzard makes. Expect StarCraft 2 to be able to run on anything made in the last 3 years. Also, see below.



That logic fails: see Crysis's (and for that matter UT3's) abysmal sales.

The reason it fails is because new computers are not necessarily game-quality computers. Most new computers have on-motherboard GPUs if they have one at all. The few that do have real GPUs with real videomemory couldn't even begin to run Crysis. And they make UT3 run at fairly low settings; certainly not the way it was meant to be played.

Most hardcore gamers build their own boxes, because that's usually the cheapest way to get the high-end equipment of the kind that they want/need.

History shows that the most successful PC games are patently not the games you have to upgrade to play.



Nonsense.

If someone makes game X, you should judge the game based on it being game X, not being game X/2 because you have crappy hardware/unwillingness to play multiplayer/etc. They should judge the game as the designers intended it to be played, not as someone might be playing it.

If anything is wrong with the gaming medium, it's the reviews very rarely ever describe the game reasonably objectively. I've yet to read a review that actually says what Sins of a Solar Empire is actually like, for example. At best, you get a sentence or two that tries to describe it as XMeetsY, which is patently unhelpful. Of course, in the SoaSE case, the developers don't bother to even try to explain what the game is like, so I guess you can't blame the media for that one.



So, you decided to lie in your title just to attract attention.

That, sir, is despicable.

Yeah, but must we pay for progress? Why not build off of the existing framework. I've seen awesome Q3 (Tremulous) and Q2 (Paintball 2) games in the open source that have unique twists and provide an engaging experience.

Yeah, but there are always alternatives, and there's more or less at least one for every commercial game out there.

The hardware requirements are a symptom, not the cause. The cause is that people are stupid and/or lazy. If they had the IQ to find out what the best price/performance computerparts are (which is very easy, just go to your local hardwaresite and see what the sites staff recommends) and either learned to puzzle the computerparts together or asked someone that know how to do it then they will get monsterperformance cheap!

Somebody said that the hardcore gamers bild their own rigs <-- duh! But anybody can do that. Those that buy OEM stuff (prebuilt computers) are either dumb or lazy or both.

I see this in one of my childhood friends even! Always had consoles and he's too dumb to handle computers skillfully (can't even get internet working with WinXP! Vista did it automatically and now he's spoiled....). Also gave the lamest excuse to as why he didn't get a gaming computer...."uuuuhh my girlfriend will say I play too much then" <-- But having a Wii and a 360 (and now a Wii & PS3) that you play on every chance you get will make her stay??) She left him btw....(said it's because of other reasons but I know it isn't so).

So the reason for the decline of PCgaming is that people are dumb and/or lazy.

Edit to reply #21

The edit function doesn't work if someone replies after you so I have to do the edit here. Stupid forumsystem....

Replace "stupid" with "dumb or ignorant" (yes, both words).

Note: I assume that "ignorant" means "unknowledgeable".

This is the problem with the Hardcore. They don't understand this one simple fact:

People don't want to be bothered.

People who can't program their VCRs aren't stupid; they simply cannot be bothered to learn how. They have more important things going on than reading a manual and poking at some vaguely clear instructions until they riddle everything out. People who don't know much about their computers aren't stupid; they simply don't care. They know enough to do the things they need to, and that's sufficient. They have more important things to do than to explore the capabilities of a box.

Why should computer game developers force people to care about things that they really don't want to care about just to play their games? I mean, is Crysis really worth the effort? Seriously, is Crysis worth learning about all kinds of trivial minutae that has no other bearing on their lives? For most people, they just flip Crysis the bird and move on.

The primary reason console games sell more than most PC games is this fact: they just work. Most reward for the least effort. Crashing is utterly unacceptable to most people who might enjoy gaming. Having a game not work due to drivers is unacceptable to most people who might enjoy gaming. They don't care that it isn't the developer's fault; the fact is that the game isn't working. And for them, no game is worth the effort of poking at stuff that they barely comprehend. Downloading a patch or new drivers isn't worth the effort; if the game isn't going to work with what they've got, then the game is broken just as sure as a microwave that doesn't cook food is broken.

PC games have come a long way in this regard; look at the horrific history of having to edit autoexec.bat to free up memory, etc. But the simple fact is that there are plenty of people who might enjoy PC gaming who simply will not put up with the needless crap that you have to go through to make the game work.