So, this isn't new. I just found this recent article about die-hard PC-centric developer id-Software embracing the console trend and, well, it reminded me of how fast that anti-PC trend is moving forward.

I'm probably one of the most PC-oriented gamers on this board, as I haven't owned a console since 2 generations. So this is worrying me. Think of all the PC classics with 3-button console controls and all inventory screens removed because it would "confuse the target audience". Basically, think "Deus Ex: Invisible War".

In the article, they mention the high prices you need to pay to get decent quality on a PC system today, and I totally agree. I'm always happy to hear industry-experts mention this as to me, this is why the PC, as a platform, is going down. Swashbuckling pirates in Scandinavia? They have always been there. But only since 2007, the price for a high-end graphics card has risen to 400+ Euros. It's ridiculous. I was patient and waited half a year to get one of the 8800 cards, and it can run most of the late-2007 games on good quality. But not very well. If I got a high-end graphics card in mid-2007, I'd be pissed right now.

I hope that the development studios realize this and cancel their Nvidia/MS-DX10 deals and start to focus on affordable technology and interesting gameplay again.

What do you guys think? It's been brought up a couple of times, I guess, so fight it out.

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Why snark works.

The gfx card makers need to lower their prices. $800 for a gfx card is not acceptable.
The game developers are designing the games to bloated. They both need to slow down. Valve has found a nice balance. I can't run ep2 at the higest setting, but i doesn't take a monster machine to do so. A amd 4000+ and a x1800 will run that game at full quality.

I hate what Crisis did to the pc gaming community. Ever sense Crisis came out every idiot thinks they need to buy 5 and 6 hundred video cards to keep up the gaming industry when it's really just on bloated piece of crap game f**king up the standard.
They're just trying to get u to spend more money and it's destroying pc gaming industry. You think they wouldn't to so stupid to shot themselves in the foot.

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Reality has become a commodity.

I've always hated console-based games. Consoles are less versatile and more obnoxious to use. I've always preferred PCs.
Maybe the people making games shouldn't go overkill on graphics. That would remove the "our PCs are too crappy" problem. Besides, most of these graphics-orientated games are so focused on making things look good that they ignore making the gameplay, AI, and storyline good altogether.
These were exactly the reasons why I didn't bother with Half-Life 2. The graphics seemed great, but the monsters and the plot seemed to be less imaginative than in Half-Life 1. To me it might be worth a play, but not for $49.99 [or $29.99 if you're lucky].
This is why I've learned to not bother with brand-new hardware, unless I scavenge them or find them for an unusually good price. I just play older games.

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Anyone who is pregnant, has been pregnant, could ever become pregnant, or who could ever impregnate others should not read this.
I told you not to read that.

You haven't played HL2 yet?

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Reality has become a commodity.

Nope. It looked cool, but it really seemed to lack the greatness that Half-Life 1 had.
I saw some of it, and I didn't like the new look of some the monsters much. The headcrabs and barnacles looked nice, but I wasn't too fond of the zombies and combine troopers.
The environment looked really cool, but for some reason I didn't like it as much as the old labs and xen areas.
And finally, at the time I would have had to run out and buy I new machine to run the damn thing. I'm not even sure that my current computer is capable of playing it without crashing.

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Anyone who is pregnant, has been pregnant, could ever become pregnant, or who could ever impregnate others should not read this.
I told you not to read that.

Like Redwood said - developers should find a balance between things like valve has. HL1 was nice because it was able to be played on just about any PC out there because they built in fall backs to their graphics engine. In general developers should be looking to expanding their demographic for gamers with low end hardware rather than squeezing it to death by not building Dx7/8/9 fall backs in their graphics engine.

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Posting And You

Nope. It looked cool, but it really seemed to lack the greatness that Half-Life 1 had.
I saw some of it, and I didn't like the new look of some the monsters much. The headcrabs and barnacles looked nice, but I wasn't too fond of the zombies and combine troopers.
The environment looked really cool, but for some reason I didn't like it as much as the old labs and xen areas.
And finally, at the time I would have had to run out and buy I new machine to run the damn thing. I'm not even sure that my current computer is capable of playing it without crashing.

What are your speks?

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Reality has become a commodity.

Lets see....
256 meg graphics card
768 megs ram
20 or so gigs of hard disk space available
pentium 3 or 4, I forget which
1.5 gig processor
DirectX 9
Windows XP
I think that's everything.

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Anyone who is pregnant, has been pregnant, could ever become pregnant, or who could ever impregnate others should not read this.
I told you not to read that.

The ignorance of this thread in regards to technology and hardware annoys me.

PC games are selling better than ever, but it still doesn't compare to the numbers console games sell. Piracy is also a huge issue on PC, since it's an open platform you can't really easily lock people out. Consoles are finally to the point to where they can compete, on a computational level, with PC hardware and developers see that and decide to go multi-platform then claim PC is dying ... it's quite bizarre. There's more money in Console gaming, of course, but the PC gaming platform is doing better than ever. Ask Valve and Blizzard, they'll attest to this. (Because those are the only two companies who are really making massive profits off of PC gaming ... maybe we should look at their anti-piracy techniques?)

I think if people want the PC platform to become bigger and better, some real, OS independent, standards need to come out (that's the only way you can get stuff done on an open platform) To unify things like online communication, payment methods, content distribution, anti-piracy, etc.

Until that happens and 80% of the PC gaming community stops stealing the games they play and claim to love PC will continue to grow, but at a much smaller pace. As a result developers will abandon the platform because they will not break even most of the time.

The other side of the same issue is, the games are being developed on a PC platform for consoles anyway ... so there's really no extra development needed for a PC version, so you might as well release it and make money off of it.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Like Redwood said - developers should find a balance between things like valve has. HL1 was nice because it was able to be played on just about any PC out there because they built in fall backs to their graphics engine. In general developers should be looking to expanding their demographic for gamers with low end hardware rather than squeezing it to death by not building Dx7/8/9 fall backs in their graphics engine.

The sad thing is, they're oscillating towards the "PC casual market" now, which is - surprise, surprise - more popular than ever. It's just more proof for the audience for PC games being still still there, people just don't want to participate in the exponentially growing hardware race anymore.

Casual hardware requirements / elaborate gameplay. The mixture should work. Publishers and developers just had to realize.

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Why snark works.

Lets see....
256 meg graphics card
768 megs ram
20 or so gigs of hard disk space available
pentium 3 or 4, I forget which
1.5 gig processor
DirectX 9
Windows XP
I think that's everything.

Eek, your speks are worse than mine... You could probably run Hl2 smothy on medium settings. That if you can clear up enough hard disk space...

@ Crono

Pc sales are up, but you would think that they would have risen in preportion with consoles. (or have they?)
Piracy is a big issue. I wish i could know what sales would be like without piracy being so prevalent. You can't give a percentage form a poll ether. You still don't know how many people would have actually bought the game if they had to too play it.

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Reality has become a commodity.

Bah, piracy is just a convenient villain for the industry. Nobody can provide exact numbers for piracy, so whenever they release a crap product, it's the pirate's fault. They start believing it themselves and actually scare away potential buyers with things like that SecuRom bulls**t that is keeping me from getting Bioshock right now.

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Why snark works.

I know people who are leaving the console world to move to PC gaming. I think there are always going to be PC gamers.

But reaper47.. it sounds like your against folks moving to consoles or the large growth in console gamers. There is nothing like having a good game playing session on the bean bag with the 5.1 sound and big HD tv with some rice crackers or whatever gaming snack you prefer.. And there is only one thing that beats that, having your freinds over and playing multiplayer. Its like your all together in the same room....

I do think that piracy is a problem though. If I look through my 320 CD case folder, the majority of my games are pirated. And not to think of the amount of times I have burned games for my freinds.

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Aaron's Stuff

is your 320 a knock off too.

but seriously, it's not cool that the majority of your game a pirated. how much money in games do you think you have burned for you and your friends?

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Reality has become a commodity.

I don't own any new consoles, my PS2 is being lent to a friend, and my Xbox is collecting dust (how suprising!). I've been a PC gamer since that meant running games from the DOS prompt. You can't really mod console games and if it weren't for the 'mod scene' I likely wouldn't be pursuing a career in game development.

My top 3 all time favorite consoles are:
Sega Genesis
Playstation
N64

Chalk it up to nostalgia, I guess. That said, none of the games I play most were released less than 3 years ago, apart from CS:Source.

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o

RedWood said:
but seriously, it's not cool that the majority of your games are pirated. how much money in games do you think you have burned for you and your friends?

Yeah I know . I mainly burn them the older games, like I haven't burned a game that was made after 2002. But its not like I don't buy PC games. The last game I brought for PC was the Orange Box, I even paid retail for it.

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Aaron's Stuff

i started my gaming on a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis?) and for the type of games that came with it, it was great. But the last 10 years i've grown into games which require precise mouse movement or detailed clicking (FPS/TBS), so those type of games on consoles are no match to their PC counterparts.

I buy a new PC for 1000 euros every 3 years, if i take a look at prices of consoles i'm not complaining... Console gamers need to buy PCs too for their internet/mail/etc.

I never counted the hours I have spent playing Goldeneye and Perfect Dark in 4-player splitscreen mode. It must have been months, combined. I'm not bashing the console as a platform here.

I just think that, whatever game you make, you have to make it for one platform, and then port it to others. It always begins somewhere. Even if the engine works just as well on all three platforms, the movement, controls, graphics, menu-design, etc will always lean towards one platform and it seems publishers tend to push to the XBox 360 to be that leading platform for everything in the future. And suddenly PC-releases have that weird "Games for Windows" badge, which only shows where this is leading.

I haven't pirated a game since my teenage years (with the exception of some rare old ones, which you can't get in stores anymore). But I think it's useless to get all moral about this. It's hypocritical in most cases anyway, who of us hasn't "pirated" a game as a teenager? By today's definition of "pirating", even lending a game to a friend is considered piracy.

Specific anti-piracy measures like DRM always end up screwing the people who are legally buying the products. Piraters don't have to worry about DRM, they can use the software freely. In the end, you feel fooled as a customer (I say it again: Bioshock and SecuRom). The only way to effectively tackle piracy directly would be an Orwellian police state and that, I think most would agree, is not an option.

Basically, I'm sick of the whining. Especially the hypocritical whining in message boards and the "we would have sold 10 million copies if it wasn't for the evil pirates!" press releases by big corporations. They wouldn't have sold 10 million copies. Maybe 10% more, but who can do exact math based on a few bittorrent statistics?

Maybe the fact that a good 50% of potential gamers do not want to buy the new, expensive hardware that is needed to even get to run the game at all? Maybe it is just a crappy clone of an existing game and people don't want to rewad the company that made it with their money? Maybe, instead of whining about piracy, adding additional services that go beyond selling the program code on a CD would convince people that downloading a virus-loaden crack from mininova isn't all that convenient?

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Why snark works.

Crono said:
The other side of the same issue is, the games are being developed on a PC platform for consoles anyway ... so there's really no extra development needed for a PC version, so you might as well release it and make money off of it.

If every game is going to be desiged as multiplatform with a console-first focus, then PC gaming might as well already be dead. If I wanted to play console games I would get a console.

As for the debate, the 360 was designed as PC-lite in order to steal users and developers away from the PC and it worked. Of course in doing so it cripples the PC market and here we are today. The graphics treadmill and piracy and all that play a part as well, but they have been there forever. The new variable is a serious competitor where it wasn't before thought possible.

I personally don't pirate software, movies or music.....anymore. There was a time several years ago, when I was rather new to the internet, that I happily did this quite alot. Napster was my friend, and OH, how sad I was when that hard drive died!. But having worked in an industry where piracy actually affects the bottom line, I simply made a choice to properly purchase whatever it is that I want, and go without all the rest. I have shiny boxes on the shelf of PhotoshopC3($699.00)
windows XP( $299.99 I think , when I bought it)
Adobe audition($299.00) etc.
You get the picture. It's a bummer about software prices.

As for consoles, I have an X-box 360, and up until our house got robbed, I had about 600.00 worth of games for it. None of them ever completed. (I almost finished Far Cry, but was so close it just did'nt seem like I needed to replace it... meh!). I can sit for hours at my PC if the game is well made and entertaining, but I just can't seem to find the same joy at my console. True enough, it's a great visual experience at the big screen with the ceiling speakers turned on, but more often than not, my interest simply does'nt hold as long for some reason. I find the controller interface kind of clumsy and difficult, at least for me.

Juim said:
have shiny boxes on the shelf of PhotoshopC3($699.00), windows XP( $299.99 I think, when I bought it), Adobe audition($299.00) etc.

Wow, thats pretty brave.

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Aaron's Stuff