Basically - I agree with what Alfonse says and would add ...

PC's are now sold in supermarkets and laptops are given away free with mobile phone contracts in the UK. They are, wrongly in my mind, treated as appliances and the current generation of users get frustrated with the inevitable problems that crop up as soon as they try and use them for anything more than email and browsing - heck they even break doing that if you don't "know what you are doing".

Add on the frustration of virus checkers, firewalls, spam filters, online security, backup and recovery ...

Those of us that do know what we are doing can keep a machine ticking over with minimal effort - but then spend our time sorting out the problems on every machine owned by our group of family and friends.

Even if those people switched to consoles for their gaming it would, unfortunately, leave a hole a lot of them still want filled:

- browsing
- email
- digital photos, music (and maybe video)
- simple household data/book-keeping

A secure, stable and foolproof system (appliance) for the above could easily be built now that would last for decades. One of those plus a games console would cater for 70/80% of the PC market.

But that would be a dead-end market so no-one will bother. It is far more profitable to convince people that they always need the latest and greatest new toy. In fact, from what I see, that battle has already been won - you would struggle to convince todays consumers that this box would do them perfectly well for a decade or two.

I have to say that as a software developer and outright geek, I love to see what the new games are capable of and how far they have come in the quality and sophistication of their graphics and sound - and gameplay (when there is any).

I do, however, feel that ever shifting specifications of PC's has led us down a road of OS and driver bloat where a vast amount of the potential of the hardware at our fingertips is wasted just catering for all of the potential differences and trying to keep things stable.

Hmm, I might have got a little off topic there - I better stop before I put everyone to sleep.

just for your information, i work at futureshop/bestbuy and do you know wich gaming platform is selling the more game?
pc.
at each shipement we receive 4 or 3 time more pc game then 360 game.
and pc game are still dicting the way to go and this is from an xbox and sony rep.

What you also have to realize is that a lot of us old coots remember PC gaming back in the days when ALL gaming was something that only nerds did because the football players would beat them up if they went outside (or other such nonsense and lies of the 80s and early 90s).

Now that gaming has gone mainstream, while the market has gotten bigger, it's gotten bigger in that frat-boy football-jock department. These are not the same kind of people who could sit down in front of say, Legend of the Red Dragon or Usurper or The Temple of Elemental Evil and play for hours - they're short attention spanned hype driven consumers. Games on consoles are really being made for them - look at Halo and Madden 200000867 - as opposed to the stuff on PCs which tends towards the RPGs and MMOs and strategy games. People like us are a smaller market, but we're fanatically loyal . I don't think PC gaming is dying nearly so much as it doesn't have the games that are uberhyped - look at GalCiv2, an incredible bit of PC gaming power, but really unknown outside the right circles - and while percentage-wise we're less than the Halos and Maddens of the world, I'm pretty sure we're just as strong as we've ever been, and in fact probably have a whole lot more people.

You think there's something wrong with the customer who cannot or will not go to the effort of acquiring a gaming PC. I think there's something wrong with the company that shares your opinion when its *AVERAGE* customer, on whose entertainment dollars the company absolutely depends for survival, cannot or will not go to that effort.

It's not the customer's job to go out of the way to cater to the company. It is most especially not the customer's job to go out of the way to cater to the company when there is another "company" available (console games) that makes no such demands on its customers for a very similar (sometimes essentially identical) product.

The dumb and lazy folks here are the game developers who'd rather blame their customers and go to value-subtracted anti-piracy solutions than actually make games their customers can play.

Yeah, PC gaming is dying. Or at least, the grossly dysfunctional brain-dead part of it is. Those developers who do not suffer from corporate insanity and/or clinical retardation will do just fine.

The requirements are one of the causes. I won't buy new parts every two weeks to get the new game working. I bought a 360 to play games. Before that, I was a PC game defender, but I switched because I don't have 2000$ to waste on a new computer when mine is still great, but not for the newest games. I'll always play games on PC, games like GalCiv2, Sins, SW Rebellion, etc.

Second, amen to Alfonse's comment (reply #25). Fortunatly for me, I was interested in the computer world enough to get to know it and make a game work if it's not. People who pay 60$ for a game that meets the specs of their rig should be able to play when they get home. Not after 3 freaking days (driver updates and so on). If he buys a 360 game, he will play right away.

And seriously, telling that people are lazy and/or dumb because they don't give a sh*t about computers is... anyway. The guy has a family, obligations and he is a doctor, so really not much time for his own. The 1 hour he has before going to bed, if he has the chance, might be where he will entertain himself a little with a game. Guess what, the game he bought crashes. Oh well, he is so dumb that he will go to sleep. The other guy is a computer engineer, works in complex systems all day long. The last thing he wants to do is debugging someone else's game, he wants to play it. I'm really curious about a thing: are you one of the "hardcore" players?

PC companies have given a lot of crappy games to the community these recent years. Bugged games, unfinished games needing patches after patches, boring games and games that require a computer not even on the market. Consoles may give people boring games also, but at least they work and you are absolutly sure in your mind that they will work on your system when you enter your card number.

But for their defense, it's also impossible to be 100% sure that the game will work on every systems that meet the specs. There is so many different hardware components from different companies, all linked together in a complex system (a computer) and interfaced by a buggy OS (adding CRAPPY OS to this for Vista) that even if all their computers at the office run the game perfectly, here on mine, it may crash. On a console, there is only one system to make it work with and if it works at the office, it will work at customers homes.

Long live to perfect PC games: HL, BG 1-2, NWN, Quake serie, GalCiv2, some MoH, AoM and so on.

Distinctions without differences. Ultimately, games are released as a collaboration between the developer and the publisher, and neither one gets to arbitrarily decide what happens without reference to the other. They share the blame for the DRM included with their games.

Similarly, blaming the customers and just not caring about them, what difference does it make? Either way, they've lost the focus on delivering a quality product in exchange for those $50 they're asking for, and then giving interviews where they say that piracy killed PC gaming without looking at whether there's more than 11 people in the world who can actually run the game. Stupid game development priorities are what's killing that portion of PC gaming that is dying. Not piracy, not consoles, not dumb customers who can't be bothered to stay 100% ahead of the PC hardware curve, just stupid priorities.

If you don't want to deliver a quality PC game, then don't publish a PC game at all. I find it hard to believe that these games that sell next to nothing because nobody can meet the system requirements, and if somebody hops into a DeLorean to buy a PC that can meet them, the DRM will stop it from running anyway, are actually recouping the cost of porting the game to the PC. I sincerely hope they're not, because that attitude - that PC gamers don't matter enough to justify providing them with a quality product - is what's wrong with the broken, dysfunctional portion of the PC gaming industry.

pure volume and dictating. and not just strategie game. we receive in order, a lot of FPS, RPG, RTS and some casual game or puzzles game. so no pc is not only for RTS.

but i know a lot of people are tired of upgrading their pc to play the latest game with all graphic at maximum, but what they need to realise is this.

most of the time, if a game is on pc and console, the pc version is more powerfull beceause we have the option to upgrade our pc but not the obligation. but for a console, you still have to ugrade, it's just a lot easier and you don't need to customize, you just buy the next console at a 500$ or you won't be able at all to play new game.
so a new pc game can still be played with an old pc(not to old)but for console you will NEED to change it.

an other factor is all the Bug. and for this i can only say that it's not every one that should have a pc, because a lot of people who do have one, at the first sign of a virus they panic and if a game is not working they think it's the PC error not the user. but i know sometime it is pc error!

so i say this, to all of you who say pc gaming is dying, just switch to a console and let us "die" in peace!

Hmmmm, edit button....Interesting.....



I've had a track ball for 5 years. My "desk" is a modified sewing table, and there is not enough room for a normal mouse. Logitech make some very good trackballs. Remember to buy one that is finger driven (ball in teh middle). The ones which are thumb driven (Ball on side), will wear out your thumb and are a bit clunkier. It takes a little getting used to, but I've even played FPS's with them with out much of a hitch

Well b*gge*r me if Firefox isn't the canines danglies!
I highlighted "pcdecrapifier" in the above post, dragged it up the tab area to create a new tab and it went straight to the right web site.

gawd I love technology when it works - it reminds me why I got into this business.

No, your local hardware store, not your local best buy. Slight difference there. Some brick and mortor stores (best buy, compusa, etc etc) aren't very good, whereas others (PC Club in my area) are useful.

Oh, hey, it works! I was using Safari on a Mac at the time of posting, so I couldn't test it.

That's why indie games are so good. They break the mold and change what we expect.

Piracy sucks, but personally, I'd rather sell a easy-to-make enjoyable project than one that I have to tear my hair out over.