With the 360 and PS3 offering lots of hardware and great graphics its great to see alot of companies stepping in on console territory since i love console gaming.
Unfortunately its usually the same stuff over and over, Halo or Gears type of games. Consoles need more RPGs, MMORPGs, and RTS made FORRRRRR consoles.
That being said its sad to see how PC gamers brag about how the PC edition of game X looks 5% better b/c of smoother edges and softer shadows. And to me thats why PC gaming is dying.
Ive been PC gaming since mid 80s and there was always a difference between consoles and PCs. Now in days consoles have been expanding their limit on what games they do... while PC has been narrowing.
PC fanboys hold on to the idea that their PC port of a console game just looks better. (mods are great though)
Point id PC gamers need to support the "little" guy who is making a PC game for PC gamers b/c it can only be on PC. No way would this game or Company of Heroes work on s console. PC gamers need to suport those games. Not Call of Duty at 120fps.
Seeing stardock cater to hardcore turn based fans is great and is what PC gaming community needs. I hope to see more developers follow suite.
What about blizzrd? Hmm i think they sold out. Loved Starcraft 1, Diablo 1, and WC 1-3. Anything afterwards seems to be clones to produce mass sales. Not happy what WOW did to the gaming community.
It's definitely nice to see companies like SD (and IC for that matter), because a console port will always be nothing more than a port. You need PC exclusives that really play to the strengths and culture of the PC, and it's nice to see there are some people out there delivering.
I'd love it if there were more Stardocks out there.
Heck, it's pretty much just us, IronClad, ntronium, Stardock, and CodeForce trying to revitalize/reinvent the 4X genre from what I've seen at this time. I mean, there's FreeOrion and so forth, yeah, but still.
Support your indie studios! We only live as long as you let us.
You have great PC companies like Relic, Blizzard, Firaxis, Valve,... Btw, PC gaming has been dying for years now, it's tiring
as in your getting tired of hearing PC gaming is dying?
Ya well im tired of seeing it happen.
Is Blizzard saving PC gaming or just standardizing it to stale crap like Activision does?
But im guessing your going off sales numbers or downloads. So hurray for COD games... which saved PC gaming??? Ya ok buddy.
Im sure whatever list you want to create for PC exclusives/greatness will be cut 50% next year and 50% the year after that. So keep thinking PC gaming isnt in trouble. Hurray for PS4 and Xbox 720
The PC stepped into console territory? There were PC games before consoles were a wet dream.
Consoles are controlled by $ pubs, that's why they have shit games.
Really man? Like the vector display games were so amazing...Consoles have been around since the early 1970's. Even in the mid 80s and early 90s my 8-bit NES was way better then any PC I saw. I really didn't like PC gaming at all until late 90s nor could I afford a PC that could run the good games.
I'd change the title to... "Need more companies like Stardock for... Everything."
But that's just me.
Of course I'm tired, because it's not true. People like you have been saying it for years, and things continue to be the same, no idea why you think now is different.
I believe the crux of his argument was that the industry is in essentially this cycle:
...and that he dislikes that cycle as it reduces the total amount of available creativity in high-level game production. (I recommend the below article & accompanying book for anyone who is interested)
I personally don't believe in the myth that the PC Market of the games industry is 'dying' but I can see how people might perceive it as such (in that what they 'know of' as the PC Market of the games industry is becoming less and less significant). Sales are as strong as ever and I don't think we're looking at a potential future crash in the market of PC Games for a long time to come; especially when SSDs, paralleled graphics cards, and quad-core processors become the norm.
I have yet to see credible evidence that anything is 'killing' PC gaming. I do not accept any statistic related to piracy as evidence and perhaps that's my problem but I fail to see how Piracy could 'kill' PC games unless the PC Market was trending downwards, which I fail to see from the resources available to me. My supposition is that people are simply nervous because now they're able to see all the wide-spread sharing of their content between folks. Even without 'mainstream piracy' as some wish to call it: friends trade their games with other friends. That's one of the very original cornerstones of the PC market. Games got popular because people made it popular through word-of-mouth, not marketing, and they made it popular by sharing. That's my conjectural analysis, anyway, and I would rather nobody take it as an expert opinion; I have no data to back those claims up, that's merely my viewpoint.
Anyway, we're getting less a piece of the pie than before, but that's because consoles have a few advantages PC gaming hasn't or doesn't wish to catch up to ("It just Plays", etc.) due to DRM, the above cycle, and other industry staples. Even so, that's not the same as 'PC gaming is dying', but I can see over-dramatization of the industry losing its appeal to some being represented as 'death'.
As far as my 'we only live as long as you allow us' was concerned, if that is what you were responding to earlier, VincentC: If Blind Mind Studios were to become an actual studio then we need money to pay our bills and rent a space to work in close proximity. The money that we get is income off our products. Should we not make enough money on our products that we're likely to be unable to pay our bills should we attempt to make another game, we'll take the safe path, shut down the studio, and try to start it up in the future if we feel like we're in a position where we can dedicate more than 50+ hrs a week on top of other responsibilities to make a game. If we are unable to find well-paying, low hourage work, then we simply will not have the time to make a game and pay for our responsibilities; thus the death knell of the studio.
So it's a perfectly valid statement to make, I feel. Independent studios like ours, where a bunch of start-ups get together, spend a huge amount of time and make a game on nearly 0 budget, rarely get more than one shot to launch their studio with a title of their own. Should this game fail, it is very likely that our studio fails with it, and I will be out of the market for a long time as I am unable to make rent right now, much less more than the lowest-tier of foodstuffs, without leaning on other people's support and calling favors. I am confident if you polled other independent studios you'd get a mixed bag of circumstances similar to what I just described.
Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2839/Analysis_What_the_Video_Game_Industry_Can_Learn_From_the_Death_of_Glam_Metal.php
What you say is the same problem any person that wants to start a business has to face, is not only related to gaming, but to really have a business plan. Check Stardock for example, they walked a looong way before doing Elemental. You can't just start the house by the roof
But small game studios have never had such a good time to start doing games and earning money as they have right now. There is superb middleware at very affordable rates (Unity, BizSpark, Unreal,...), and lots of different platforms to target (XBLIG, App Marketplace, PSP Minis, WiiWare, Steam,...).
Agreed. It's truly amazing to consider where we are now compared to where we were even six years ago as far as diversity in middleware solutions.
I meant like its good to see present day companies take interest in consoles. Meaning ya PC companies say hey looks a console. It adds more diversity to console games.
Well maybe i shouldnt say im happy to see that. Since companies tend to do that to appeal to the massives to make $$$s. Thus standardization. But Blizzard suprisingly already did that to PC community.
Want to say a bit about 2 well-known "PC" companies.
Blizzard was a great PC company in 1997-2000 but not now. They aren't supporting PC gaming anymore. SCII was cut into 3 pieces - each one costs $60 (like console games) and you have to pay every month/year to play SINGLE PLAYER (like MMO) (as far as I know. I predict same crap for Diablo III. IMO PC gaming can live without these new Blizzard titles.
Valve turned into Microsoft way. They're making truly PC games for the X360. I can't get it, why on earth they're doing this? Valve earns enough money from PC sales alone. Crap. Also I hate their Steam-exclusive policy when more and more games require Steam to play.
Stardock is the best PC gaming company nowdays. It's 2010, not 2004 anymore.
No. There is no monthly fee aside from Russia, where they're pricing the game itself cheaply but charging something like $3/mo to compete with the bootleg game sellers who are very prevalent over there.
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