you must factor into the cost of the computer the fact taht you do more than just game. It is a MUST for today's work.

Also, consoles do have failures, its just a lot of people just accept it and work around it. Also, ps2s are infamous for having problems with reading after a while. My burnout disk is no longer read much to my disappointment.

Well, they run like crap, but most people only need some shitty e-machine to get by. That they could build their own for a little more and have something really nice isn't a factor. People that buy crap are too ignorant to be using a computer to start with, let alone putting one together.

Computers are hard to use, if you're a moron. If you don't research your hardware before buying, or you do dumb things like download warez off porn sites, you're going to have problems even if you do the intelligent things like keeping up to date. When it comes to idiots, consoles have a massive, unmitigated edge over the PC. Fortunately.

"Bakers keep people alive. Artists make life worth living.

So who's ultimately more important"

I beg to differ, I believe procreation is the driving force behind the will to live. Artists give you things to amuse yourself the rest of the time. Also, it took you 20 hours to beat Half-life 2?

That's just the console. They actually make most of their money by selling games.



My point is that, as far as ease of use is concerned, PCs and consoles are actually getting closer to each other. You no longer have to go through lots of hoops to buy, install, and play a game.



nVidia provides an automatic update utility, although I usually do the update manually. I'm not sure why they don't go through Windows Update, but theoretically they could.

A fast computer with a good videocard is not. You can be very functional with a computer built from $400 (without monitor, keyboard, etc). It can run just about anything very well (even Vista if you turn off the shiny bits), even playing DVDs and so forth. Media encoding, compiling large programs, and gaming are out of course, but everything else will be very fast.

Most people own more computing horsepower than they need for their "work".



It doesn't change the fact that you're spending less on the console than a computer.



Unless you need drivers.



And what of the other 45% of the gaming public with ATi cards?

Give Brad some time and he'll have automatic driver card updates hooked in to Impulse.

Seriously.

I'm not kidding.

He's in talks with both nVidia and ATi right now.

Play AoC and ask yourself again if its dying

PC gaming? dying? not yet.

I love my ps3 and all, but I can't imagine trying to play a decent rts to tbs on it. RPGs suck on it, don't believe me? try Oblivion. Good game and all, but better on pc.

I look at it this way, as long as they WRITE the game on a pc, PLAYING the game on pc will always be a little faster, alittle more intuitive. If I want to play madden or any FPS, I go to the ps3. Anything else I play on the computer.

I will say this to devs tho. If you sell me an incomplete game on pc I'll be irritated. I'll spend 50 or 60 bucks on a good game, but not on a beta. Tweaks are one thing, overhauls and rereleases are another. Another thing is that if you're going to make a series, or join a series, don't make the game into something it wasn't in the first one. Take MOO/Starlords. All about researching that cool new gun you can stick on your fighter to go blast some nasties in tactical combat. MOO3-macromanagement at empire level and "formations" of ships that look pretty much the same, all in the name of keeping to the"storyline". Feh. Look at Civ now. You could learn how to play on Civ1, break out a copy of civ4 and pretty much jump in. It's prettier, a little more depth, a little smarter ai, but it's still the same game. If there's a sins 2 I expect a civ like evolution versus a Moo style redo.

(steps off of soapbox)

Quote - PC games are at the point where I can click an icon and the game just works. I don't even have to bother looking for the right CD anymore.

Are you kidding? Although I would never get a console, and spend 2k a year on my comp . . . this is just a insane statement.

List of games that so far has failed me in the last few years (in this respect, they are still fun) - Neverwinter Nights 1, Neverwinter Nights 2, Crysis, Galactic Civ II, and SoSE. Only COD4 worked right out of the box. Most games needed patching (which was a PITA big time, especially Stardock's system . . I pay for my games, yet I still have been unable to patch GCII, with a half dozen messages about different email addys, etc. THat game was abandonded, sorry no Arnon expansion now for me, since I can't patch it), and custom content and features almost never work right, especailly right away. COD4 was the only one, with its auto-DL of features.

Main hurdle to comp games - you gotta know comps well to make them work. IMHO of course.

Yep, PC games require an obscene amount of setup. With only 8 GB free at my best times, I can't buy $60 games in their PC equivalent because they require four GB at least (or so I hope).

Yup you hit the mail on its head. Eventually the "pretty" element will die away as a saleable feature when the Bar becomes permanently raised. At that point there will be a new "norm", and the herds will stop stampeding around for short term glory as "all will do it".

The PC market is far too vast to die off in terms of a platform for games, its an insane concept. As a gap appears in that market space (as it does from time to time), it will not take long for a shrewd business mind to step in and fill that gap. As soon as something becoming commonly obtainable, people move on to find something else to be seen to be "different" about.

The rise and rise of Mobile Phones was a classic case in point. As soon as they became widely available, those who had yelled about how silly they were, suddenly lost their "deep principles" and got one They are now unremarkable parts of the landscape, and not ego enhancing widgets. The ego chasers have moved on to find something else to yell about. Probably Consoles rofl

Dying? Nah, never happen - change/evolve, thats for sure.

Die off? not a chance.

Regards
Zy

I never said it would die off, merely that it is dying, and has a potential to do so in the event of a catastrophe. It's simply likely that the fall (or exodus) of commercial titans will turn it into having 10% of the activity from said titans it used to have. This would leave an open-source and Indie majority.

Fine by me. Devotion to profit as a first motive seems very often connected to long term quality and/or ethical problems.

I don't object to profits per se, but when you combine a profits-first attitude with a large scale formal organization, you end up with things like MoO3 and frakking "copy protection" that hoses player PCs.

I won't even get started about how stupid the folks who own the MoM name are. Turning that over to Stardock for a reasonable cut would have earned them decent bucks *and* a bit of cred with hardcore folks in our weird little game niche. But noooo, branding control is too important, got to have the chain of ADDled marketing "teams" in the loop for every line of code in the project...

Hey, you're forgetting, I'm more open-source/indie than commercial. Quite frankly, the profit devotion puts me off too. Quality suffers too much.

Yep, large-scale and profits-first means that you get a huge group of people coming up with as many ways as possible to make it impossible to play the game.

I don't agree. Trying to maximize your profit long-term means you have to make a good playable game. So a *well done* profits-first strategy benefits everybody.

The problem is that few people in the planning are that much into long term strategy. Usually it's all about getting good numbers this year and that's it.

No, it means you make one good, playable game, and add in ads and a couple new features (cycling them in and out occasionally until they're forgotten), and building crappy game engines that allow you to swap models and gameplay features in and out to utilize franchises cheaply and efficiently while needing upgrades only once every five years when the consoles come out.