QFT.

~ Wyndstar

Not so much dying as shifting from a "commercial behemoth" model to an "indie gaming" model, which frankly results in better games anyway. And yes, system requirements for the big commercial releases have become so ridiculous I've long since started only buying them several years after their release.

Two words: ITS NOT

I heard that the reason most new computer games require the latest and greatest computer specs is because the market of people purchasing new computers (who in turn purchase the latest games to go with those computers) is greater than the market of those who stubbornly hold onto to their old computers for years.

Money talks. If we all agreed to never, ever buy new computers, games would be made to work on our old computers. However, I think it is good that we continue to push the boundaries of video game technology further and further. Has improved technology in video games translated into improved technology in other area such as in medicine, communications, etc.? I am willing to bet that it has.

Also, how many of us have bought computer upgrades or brand new computers just to be able to play some of the latest and greatest computer games? I know I have before. So, by releasing system intensive games, gamers help out the computer market too!

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

I just wanted to raise my hand on this. I bought a new computer just to play Quake 1 since my 486SX didn't have a FPU.

Other than that, I can't think of any computer purchases/hardware purchases that revolved around one game in particular. I may have realized that the next generation of games would require something better and thusly got a new one...but Quake 1 was the only one that had forced my hand by itself.

~takes his teeth out and shakes his cane at whipper snappers in his yard~

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.

The gaming press is a problem, generally. They're a very specific kind of gamer: hardcore, with a large base of friends to play MP (and virtually no schedule problems), a large amount of time to play games, high end hardware, and they've played virtually everything (so what may seem new to me may be old hat to them). All these factors distort their reviews relative to gamers that don't fit those categories, which I think its safe to say is most of us.

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.

I would say the people playing the PC games are changing. I still
have my first PC and the games I played them on. It's a Tandy
1000EX with a windows 1.0 ... It's old and still works too.

The only PC game that required me to upgrade was iDs Quake ..
I upgraded to a faster Intel processor and a 3DFX 3d graphics
card.

Right now ... I prefer RTS games over FPS ... My other bad habit
is upgrading my PC ... New graphics cards ... CPUs .. more memory
an stuff like that ...

Right now ... I'm in the process getting the parts for a new system
together ...

PC games are getting more complex and require better hardware, but
the tools that help design games need to improve too.

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..

I don't feel it is dying, just being remade. The choice of words in the title is to bring people in.

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.

MMO's I don't consider PC games. I consider them virtual crack. Download sales, though, are not something I can check often.

I believe that only the open-source/freeware and indie communities really have any luck in the PC market anymore, especially now that people have such a range of machines.

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.