I agree about spending 5k to go top of the line but the fact is I know someone with a top of the line PC, I however opted for the slightly cheaper option and my system still runs everything well and we both need to upgrade at the same time. Offcourse top notch components are good but the actual performance increase in real terms between a borderline top notch PC and a top line PC if both are built with gaming in mind are pretty insignificant in real terms. (There is a differance though and I agree about memory)

Last two news update from this site just owned your post, lol.

I'll grant that those are decent components, and you save a bit with the rebates, but without a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, and operating system, you're still a bit short of a usable system.

I was thinking of a system spec'd at least to the level of the Ars Technica "Hot Rod" (see their system guide here: http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200803.ars/3), which is closer to $1,600.

The original point, though, is that consoles are much less expensive than PCs, especially if you consider a 5+ year console life span.

read this:
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10254&Itemid=2

Do you really need to ask what my point it? I thought you'd have been intelligent enough to see that I was basically posting that in support of your argument that Crysis isn't doing as well as the people on this board are exclaiming.

I posted the link to show that Crytek is complaining about their sales. Yes, they're blaming piracy, and to be honest, they're probably partially correct. However, the main conclusion that you can draw from that article is that Crytek is saying "We didn't make the amount of money we thought we'd make"

Also, a bit besides the point, I'd venture a guess that they monitor the various p2p sites and see how many people are sharing their files. If Crysis is on the top 10 or even no.1 on p2p sites, that would indicate a problem. (that was an example, by the way. I'm not saying this is how it is).

The problem with many PC games/devs these days, at least the games/devs that are jumping the PC-ship, is that there's little incentive to purchase the game. They create really robust engines but offer little reason to go online. Stardock gets around this by updating the game with patches that can only be obtained through buying the game. As well, they have games now that offer compelling online.

At this point, piracy is something devs just have to accept. So then, the question become not "how do we stop it", but "how do we encourage people to buy the game".

Yes. The article basically talked about piracy being the death of PC games. And it was not just Crytek was saying that.



Wait, what? The incentive in purchasing the game is that you get to play it! You don't buy the game, you don't get to play it. You should not have to provide more incentive than that to get people to pay for your game.

The very fact that people think that you have to do more than provide your game for sale in order to get people to buy it says that there is something very wrong with the way some people are thinking.



Having played the initial release of GC2, I could just as easily say that StarDock got around this by releasing a beta product that was clearly not finished, thus thwarting pirates with an inferior product, while using the money gained from early sales to continue to develop the game into a mature, finished release.



You have to accept some piracy. It's going to happen. What you don't have to accept is that everyone will pirate your game unless you provide some value-added proposition for those who don't.

Any number of games make money alongside pirated copies of them. Without value-added propositions. You don't need to do that sort of thing as long as you provide an entertaining product at a fair price.

See, the problem is that you're suggesting that Crysys is selling poorly because of piracy. That is, if there were some value-added proposition, it would sell better. That's nonsense.

Crysis sold poorly because it was a poorly made game that is, ultimately, no more fun than the much more accessible HL2. Only a paltry few percent of people could even consider running the game, thus cutting their playerbase to almost nothing. That it sold 1 million copies at all is a feat.

I don't think piracy is a major factor in the downturn in the PC market. Note: it is not a good thing. But it isn't what is running PC developers out of this market. What's doing that is their unflinching unwillingness to make their games cheaper by not spending so much on development.

The most successful PC developers are the ones who make games that lots of people who would be interested in playing them would actually play. Not necessarily unpretty, but they don't rely on the latest technology for you to have a good experience with their games. Blizzard and Valve are the current practitioners of this technique, and both have reaped the rewards. Contrast to Id software, who basically just make engines now. Niether Blizzard nor Valve is particularly concerned about piracy, because it doesn't hurt them that much.

Let's say the average rate of piracy for a game is 10%. That's a high estimate, but so be it. And lets (falsely) assume that each pirated copy is a lost sale. So, if your game can only ever work on 1 million computers, watching 100,000 sales go away is really bad for you. But if your userbase is 10 million computers, you won't be so put out by 1 million sales going away, because you still have 9 million others.

Piracy is holding the industry back from reaching its full potential, but PC gaming is certainly not dying. Developers are not so much concerned about the theives that have been shoplifting their whole lives - they don't respect the system, and likely never will. We are very concerned about the large number of people on the fence that could go one way or the other.

There's this concept that you should be aware of called inflation. It causes the price of things to rise over time. For a good 10 years, videogame prices were fixed at $50, yet the cost of development has quadrupled (at a minimum).

That you only have to pay $60 for a high-quality game is a steal, as that would be the inflation-adjusted price of $50 from 10 years ago. By all rights, $70-$80 should be the standard price for a game that costs $30 million to make.

In short, high-end videogames are cheaper than they ought to be, and you should be grateful for that.

No, the real problem is that game prices are fixed to a single price. One of the reasons for the success of GC2 and SoaSE is that they're sold for less than the standard price. They can do this because they cost less to make. Blockbuster movies on DVD tend to cost more than, say, romantic comedies. There's no reason why the game industry should balk at that.

More game developers should stop trying to make $30 million games. Sure, you're always have your StarCraft II's and your HL3's and your Doom IV's. But they'll be like summer blockbusters in terms of content and comparative rarity.

No, sixty dollars is way too much. A game costs $2 to put on a disk. Use an existing engine, and if you sell 20 million like most high-end games do, you should have no problem charging $20. Plus, if you've ever played freeware or open source equivalents, you will realize that $60 really is a rip-off. Plus, shall I point out that the greedy publishers almost always get the majority of the money, so the developers really don't make that much in all cases..

Ah, but you're talking from the publisher's point.

The developers are the guys who make or decide upon the engine (don't whine about costs, the Q3 engine is perfectly good, Torgue costs little, and there's thousands of open source entities), equipment should be relatively cheap, utility bills should be cheap also, wages should be not that cheap but not near $1M, marketing could be expensive, but there's always Indie style word of mouth.

Freeware games may be of poor quality, but there are many examples of professional quality freeware games. A big corporation with a big office in the downtown area, with secretaries, is wasting money. The publisher seems to be your standpoint, but you forget that Doom was shareware and grossed how much? And it grew into a huge franchise, shall I point out. Shareholders should not be allowed in a game company, only community, as shareholders ruin business.

I will whine about a sixty dollar price tag, because I pay that much only for a rare piece of art, not every game that feels entitled to its huge price tag simply because it's on the PS3 or Xbox 360.

I don't know that it's dying but it does seem to be in a recession of sorts.

I've been playing PC games for a long, long time and I've played and bought tons of games.

For me, I don't care that much for RTS and only play the very best of FPS, and those 2 genres seem to be the bulk of what gets released.

I miss the older days of PC gaming where most of the titles were strategy oriented or were more like "pc games" than console games made for PCs.

What truly boggles my mind is that a lot of the best titles, genres, and styles of PC games from before RTS or FPS even existed or became popular are never revisited or revived - instead, everything is remade into yet another damned RTS or FPS (like how Bethesda is bastardizing and morrowindifying Fallout). Nobody makes anything like the old BG games. Nobody makes anything like Colonization (well, they do, but it they're graphically bloated RTS style and just not the same).

There are a lot of excellent things that have come about thru the evolution of PC gaming but to me a lot of the magic of older games is missing from many of today's titles.

PC games will do well with an indie development team because two people can take an open-source engine and make it into a wonder of computing, while leaving it easy enough to use.

The idea that all freeware games are crappy is bad, because, quite simply, many commercial games are crappy too. The freeware games are met with more opposition, and many do suck, but there are always some that strive to be better than the rest and succeed.

Examples: ADOM, AssaultCube, Battle for Wesnoth, Cave Story, Cube, Dwarf Fortress, Eternal Daughter, Frets on Fire, Gate88, GearHead series, GeneRally, Glest, Icy Tower, N, Sauerbraten, Seiklus, Vega Strike, from the limited category of "always free" freeware games, not including free to play and commercial to freeware, and some open source. And this is just from the list on Wikipedia that I have tried.

Why did you tell the Lord to take an economics class?

The price of developing an game might be high, but if you expect it to gross 20M copies, why charge so extortionately for each one? It cuts down sales and will limit return-appeal. Plus, it's not like it costs more than ten dollars max to create and ship a game's physical part.