I'm fine with anti-cheat programs (though leave 'em off my darn single player games, I wanna cheat with CE solo!). The problem I have is this: Why do I not have to validate my 360 games (Yes, it is possible to find bootleg software) or DS games (Even more bootleggable), but my PC games are such a pain to jump through hoops versus the push'n'play.

DUH

That is all.

(If I have to explain this again I think something important in my brain is going to burst and kill me)

The problem with PC games is that people make them too often based entirely on graphics, and not enough on gameplay. Also, people don't like to use as many of the optimizing features as are possible, because they almost always alienate those with different hardware.

American society as a whole is kinda screwed up due to value judgements such as the premise of this thread.

I mean seriously does anyone here literally think PC gaming is actually dying, as in its going to be dead at some point in the near future? Like gone, no games at all on PC's? Thats just idiotic as long is a definable computing appliance that fits the definition on Personal Computer there will be games made for PC's. At some point in the future im sure the PC, TV, console, DVD/VCR player, are all going to merge but thats probably not for another 25-50 years, not that we couldn't make one now its just not viable from a distribution, infrastructure, and manufacturing standpoint. At that point the appliance will probably be best named as a HC (Home Computer) and you'll be able to hook up all sorts of I/O devices.

Regardless right now and for a good bit into the future the question and the topic being dicussed around the industry is not about whether PC Gaming is dying, it's about whether or not PC Gaming is a viable commodity. And that brings me back to my original point; americans are screwed up because they judge the intrinsic value of something based on its market worth, its raw dollar amount. This is just a screwed up personal world view that comes from living in capitalistic society. And let me be clear here theres nothing wrong with capitalism but there is something wrong with allowing it to determine the value of pretty much everything in society.

For instance, I have a cousin (1st cousin) who is crazy (schizo) and spends most of his time in a mental hosipital but lives with his parents when his meds are working for prolonged periods. He paints and is an incredible artist he does all forms of art and can do the highly photo realistic stuff. His has never tried to sell his art but its all over my house, to me it has alot of value and worth but if i tried to sell it i probably couldn't get alot for it. Just an example that the worth or value of something to an individual can be different than the economic value of something.

PC Games are art and most games have a worth that has nothing to do with the economic value of the game. The people making games have shifted from the artists to the capitalists and their interepretation of value of games is all about the potential economic value that games can generate. Even this wouldnt be all that bad if we were talking basic intrinsic economic value( i spend x to make a PC game that makes y in sales, y > x im a happy capitalist ) but were not. Games are being made by large public companies (like EA) whose primary goal is growth. If the first game y-x=z, z is my profit, on my second game z better get larger because then the companies stock goes up. In most capitalistic endeavors this makes sense as I incorporate more and reduce administrative/RnD/etc cost at the very least my costs should go down and my profit should increase. PC games just simply dont work in this model there just too complex as well as the platform itself. Consoles on the other hand are pretty easy and fit pretty well into the large developer public company model.

Long story short the argument of whether PC games are dying is really can PC games provide growth for public companies. The answer in general is a qualified no. There are limited resources in any industry and to make the most money in a large development studio your effort to maximise profits are going to be best aimed at the console market, the qualification is that there are still some viable PC games for large development shops to reliably make a good profit, titles like the SIMs and WoW, and most blizzard products in general show that even in this respect PC's games are viable commodities.

Hopefully the rest of the PC gaming industry will now turn back to the small independant developers who have a desire to produce a specific type of game for an artistic valuation of a games worth and a private ownership model where growth is not as much of a factor in the capitialistic aspect as simply making a reasonable profit.

You can see this happening right now and youll continue to see it happening even more as the publishing model is changing more to digital and publishers such as steam and impulse are providing this outlet. In the years to come we should see PC gaming take off and provide both a very few highly polished big developer titles and large numbers of small shop titles for all the genres of games.

And then theres the WoW factor. WoW in and of itself is like an entire other market. Theres PC, console, and WoW. And here is where the PC has a joker up its sleeve vs the console. You cant make WoW work on a console its way to complex. Plus you have some large companies running around drooling at the prospect of making the next subscription based game that can even come close to the sales of WoW. Ideas are cheap but dont think its not possible for someone to come up with something pretty darn good and change the whole thing around.

Theres also alot of room for retro sequels. Its not going to take too long before we see Mechwarrior 5, Wing Commander VI, Elite II, Master of Magic II MOO 4, etc etc. And one of these is going to have some money behind it and all the 30 somethings are going to run out and buy them and all the 20 somethings will want to play the games the always heard hyped up by their older brothers and then the teenagers as well will run out and buy em for pretty much the same reason. It's just a personal opinion but the old great games from the 90's died due to the, well due to the fairly stupid argument this thread put forth and they have been dead for some time. Someone is going to make a grat retro/modern game of one of these classics sometime soon and is going to make alot of money and from there it will follow with more and more til it gets flooded again and the market dies, and the rollercoaster just keeps on going

up
and
down

Or to put it another way, the value you place on his art is significantly greater than the value that anyone else places on it. How is capitalism undermining that? All it means is that you will keep those paintings rather than sell them, since you benefit more from them than anyone else, and hence won't sell them. Thus the person who derives the most enjoyment out of those paintings ends up owning them!


No, this is not the case. Yes, you can argue that PC games are a work of art, but their worth has everything to do with the "economic value" of the game, because they are games - that is, items sold for an entertainment value. The price attached to each game will typically be the amount deemed to maximise the profit from that game, which is highly correlated to the amount that will maximise the sales revenue for that particular game. This then results in a price that a large number of people are prepared to pay for the game, from which you can obtain it's worth. To argue that a game that sells for $10 is really worth $100 because it is a piece of art is flawed. It may be that some of those people paying $10 for that game would be prepared to pay $100 for it, but if the game was priced at $100 you wouldn't sell as many because only a few people are prepared to pay that much, hence what you are then talking about is simply the worth of that game to an individual (which is different from the actual value of that game overall). To put it a bit more clearly, the "value" of the game, ignoring cost of sales and a few other minor considerations, is simply the price of that game times by the number of people who will buy it at that price. So the worth of the game has everything to do with the "economic value" of it.


Actually "large public companies (like EA)" exist to make profit. Their stock goes up if investors believe the likely profit that they will make has increased. So their focus isn't about growth, it is about profit, and the more of it the better. It's no good doubling your sales if it comes at the cost of halving your overall profit - then your stock would go down, not up (unless it is as part of a more specialised strategy such as a new firm entering the market, or other cases - e.g. boost your sales revenue to establish yourself in the market, and once established you can afford to increase your prices and hence profit margins without your sales revenue suffering too much, thanks to your strong presence). Obviously if you can increase your profit it is good, but growth by itself is typically used in reference to a companies size/sales revenue, not profit growth.

Slightly more theoretically, you could argue that shareholders are only interested in the money they gain from their shares in the company, which in turn will come from dividends. Thus the share price will be based off the amount of dividends it is expected the company can provide (and then capital gains/losses will also be realised if the company increases/decreases expectations of the dividends it will be paying). Now dividends typically come from the profit that the company makes (that is, the profit after tax is either reinvested back into the company, or is paid out to shareholders). Now let's say you have 2 companies expected to pay out the same proportion of their profits as dividends indefinitely; The one company has a net profit ratio of 20%, and sales revenue of $100,000, meaning (ignoring taxes to keep things a bit simpler) it will have profits of 20k. The other firm however has pursued growth, and has sales revenue of $1,000,000. The only problem is that it has a profit ratio of just 1%, and it is not expected to be able to raise this figure at all unless it is at the cost of sales revenue.

Now as a shareholder, which would you prefer, the company who is selling loads and loads, but making hardly any money on it (in turn meaning it hardly gives any money out in dividends), or the company which is much smaller, but which has higher levels of profit, in turn meaning it pays out more in dividends? That is, would you rather receive say $100 a year, or $50 a year? Obviously unless you're expecting those figures to then change over future years to change the situation, you'd prefer $100 a year, hence meaning the share price of the smaller but more profitable firm will be higher than the share price of the larger less profitable firm. There are a ton of simplifications with this example, but it's mainly to provide an illustration of how profit rather than growth is the key factor in a firms share price.



Huh? PC games simply do work in this model, hence why so much money is made off them. Produce a good game, make people aware of it, and chances are it will sell. Providing you didn't spend a massive fortune making that game, it means you'll likely make profit. Make loads of bad games, and people will be less likely to buy your games, meaning you're more likely to make a loss. To put it another way, let's say you're making PC games (using a capitalist model). You want to maximise your revenue while minimising your costs. How to maximise your revenue? Produce a good game (gets good reviews+recommendations, makes people more likely to buy it), Raise awareness of that game (e.g. marketing), produce a game people will actually want to play (it's no good producing an amazing game that costs a fortune if it's for a ridiculously small niche market), etc.;
For costs, don't spend too much on having amazing graphics (unless you think that the increased sales from the improved graphics will outweigh the increased costs), don't introduce other features/bells+whistles if hardly anyone is going to care about them in the first place and they cost alot to do, etc. etc.

The end result is that companies end up having to listen to gamers and what they want, since this in turn helps them make more money. The good firms who keep on adapting+giving gamers what they want end up doing well, the bad firms who don't end up doing worse. There are obviously some time lags and exceptions (DRM is probably a good example atm - something which companies pay for and which has the result of decreasing their sales, but which fortunately some firms seem to be realising is a bad thing and are phasing it out or not using it at all), but on the whole it is a very good framework.



As explained above, this has little to do with it really. The key question is can PC games provide PROFIT for companies. The amount of profit opportunities will then affect the size of the PC gaming industry, but there will always (well, in the forseeable future) be such potential for profits. I'll just go through it again quickly; let's say that hypothetically there are no more growth prospects in PC gaming - that is, the market is expected to shrink over the coming years, and the big companies expect their market share will also fall slightly. By your reasoning this seems to suggest they will leave/PC gaming will be dying. Let's say that all these big companies like EA do then leave. What happens? Well if no-ones producing all of the games that they would have been, yet there is still the demand for those games, all you need is for some new company to come along and take their place producing these games that people want, and they can make a ton of money! So long as money can be made off it at a suitable rate of return, such companies will therefore exist. As for whether big companies themselves will specifically exist, that depends on other issues, such as barriers to entry in the market/heavy sunk costs for making a game, economies of scale, etc., as to whether you're likely to end up in a market dominated by a few big firms or lots of little ones.


So long as profits can be made from the PC gaming market, then if you're a large development studio you would be foolish to ignore it completely and focus only on one market if you could have 2. Bear in mind just because you're a "large" company, it doesn't mean you can't just have a tiny division of your large company with just 1 person in it, who works on a particular area. So for example if you employ 1000 people, you could always have 399 focusing on consoles and 1 on PC gaming if you believed the profits from PC gaming are tiny and the ones from consoles are massive, but that you suffer diminishing returns to scale from work/investment in consoles and pc gaming meaning that 1 person will make more money for you working in pc gaming than in consoles.




Who is making this artistic valuation? I mean a painting might sell for millions of pounds because there is only 1 of that painting, and there are a few people with ridiculous amounts of money who place a high value on it. As such, any painting will have a value placed on it as being equal to what it will sell for. With a game of course you can produce multiple copies of the same game, hence why I don't follow what you mean with this "artistic valuation". Either you mean the valuation of the game in terms of what it would sell for, or the valuation of it to a particular individual (how much it is worth to them). Either way, it wouldn't affect the fundamental capital framekwork used, which will always be followed regardless of whether PC gaming is dominated by lots of small firms or a few large firms. Would you care to explain how you see a market functioning based on individuals valuations of items, as opposed to the market valuations? (since one extreme, where a company is able to sell it's product to each person separately at a price equal to the value they place on it, or the "artistic value" for that person, just isn't viable)



I'm curious, why not? It depends on what you mean by not being able to make it "work" of course (work in terms of being possible, or being profitable, since there is a massive difference), but it would be quite possible for WoW to be available on consoles. It's not presumably because it's not deemed to be sufficiently profitable however (you'd have the issue of commission to the console creators, and the considerable expense of making the game run on the relevant consoles along with adapting the controls/interface slightly, which if you're only going to be targeting a small userbase likely isn't worth the effort).

Not that I disagree with some of the points that you make, of course, I just took issue with a few of them .

What I meant to show by this was that value has another meaning that is not dependant upon market valuation. I myself am a capitalist, I have made a ton of money off the market but I also recognize that we have been teaching everyone in our society that value is equivalent to market worth. Another example might be a teacher whose paid 30k a year, that teachers value to a student could be much higher on an academic or even "life lesson" scale yet our society, in general, will deem that persons value in the dollar amount of their salary.



Again your missing the point i never said a $10 dollar game is worth $100 your putting up a straw man. A person who pays whatever price for a game will have a sense of value for the game that has nothing to do with market value. Your essentially proving my point since it seems your almost incapable of seperating the market worth of an item from its value.



Your just wrong on this point stocks go up mainly because of speculation and growth. Basically a company has to make a larger profit every quarter to show growth and hence increase the valuation of the stock. If you make $100 in profit every quarter your stock will not go up and you'll probably have to start paying dividends in order to stabilize ownership of your stock, i.e. people not try to sell your stock and there not being any buyers. This is all stock market 101.



No there incredibly complex compared to console games and have an inherent lack of stability because of the various hardware a PC can be made from. Also the market is smaller and unknown. Your going to have a pretty good idea of your market if you make a racing game for the XBOX 360. You make a racing game for the PC and your not even going to know if people in your assumed market have the PC power to run your game. Without WoW i think the gross is something like 4x larger for the Console market over the PC.



Again you have shown a lack of understanding of the stock market. If were talking completly about private non traded companies your assertions would be correct which is why I have pointed out that the industry will turn to smaller private development shops as the larger public development house free up more space in the market by not making as many PC titles because there risky from a growth perspective.



I thought that was obvious, the company that decided to make the game because the developers are artists and the game is the picture they want to paint for artistic reasons. They'll determine the artistic worth of the game not based on sales but upon their artistic interpretation of the final piece of art.



I own an XBOX360, a Wii, and a high end PC. I also have a MS Computer Science and have been programming for a living for 17 years. No you can't make WoW work on current consoles to a "playable" degree where people would purchase it. Conceptually its entirely possible to make WoW work on a console type of gaming appliance but for all realistic modern contingencies no you cant make it work.

Well with anyone who is employed, you would hope the value that they provide through labour is greater than the amount you are paying them, or else you'd be better off not employing them/employing someone else!


Hardly. You seem to be wanting some idealised world where subjective/notional concepts of value are used (i.e. an individuals valuation of something). You fail to give a single example of how this is possible though, most likely because it just isn't possible (only in extremely theoretical scenarios could you have such a situation where an individuals valuation of an item is always used, as I explained later on)


This suggests there's a fairly fundamental gap in your understanding of the stock market. I'll spell it out again; assuming that the ability to vote (as a shareholder) is of no value to you, then buying a share in a company will entitle you to capital gains/losses, and dividends. Capital gains/losses are based on what is expected to happen for the firms future dividends, since the dividends themselves are the only direct source of money (in this case I'm using dividends to encompass all forms of payout policy on the part of the company to save use of lots of different terms and encorporating all the varients+differences etc.). Hence a firms value will only be affected as a result of these expected dividends being affected.

Here's a really simple example: You have a company earning $100 in every quarter (to use the figures you gave above). Lets say the company is expected to earn $100 in every quarter indefinitely (you can also do a more realistic example such as that it will grow by x%, or stop after t years, using the exact same analysis, but for now lets keep things simple). The company has 100,000 shares in circulation. What would you expect the price of those shares to be? The present value (discounted at the risk-adjusted rate for that company) of that stream of future payments divided by the number of shares. THAT is "stock market 101" since you can't really get much more basic than it.

Now, as to stock prices mainly only going up on speculation and growth, again you are missing the reason behind all this. A stock price may go up from speculation IF that speculation is that this future stream of profits will increase! Meanwhile growth may increase the price IF it is expected to translate into a growth in this future stream of profits! Speculation that this future stream of profits is likely to fall, or alternatively growth in sales revenue that is expected to cause the future stream of profits to fall will both cause the stock price to decrease, not increase.

"PC games simply do work in this model, hence why so much money is made off them"

To say no you'd have to be able to show that no company has been able to make a profit from the PC gaming market. I find that pretty hard to believe, so before you go further maybe you should go and check the statistics on that first. You also seem to be getting in a muddle about the improtance of the size of the console market relative to the PC market; the PC market could be 1/10th the size of the console market, and a capitalist framework of profit maximisation would still work for it (while the market composition of it would depend on the factors I already outlined as to whether you see a few big firms or lots of small ones). Even if you had various market imperfections for which a pure market economy system wouldn't be ideal, again you'd still want to be using this underlying profit maximisation framework, you'd just be looking at correcting those various imperfections to make it more efficient.


(just a note, if you're going to say something like this, it helps to follow it up with a reason why, rather than just saying where you believe I am correct and missing out where you believe I'm incorrect)


"Who is making this artistic valuation?"

So just to clarify, the developers wouldn't be interested in maximising profits? That is rather than sell their game at price x and gain $100,000 they'd prefer to sell it at price y and gain $50,000, because they place a higher value on their game than many other people?! It is also here that your painting analogy is staring to get a bit flaky, since a game is produced countless times, whereas a painting is only ever done once. So the value of a game (from the perspective of a company) will be the sum of profits it is expected to yield at the profit maximising price; that then means that for an "artistic valuation" to be applied to it that is different to this, the actual value of that game would fall, hence meaning you would be selling your game for less than it's worth (or to try and stretch the painting analogy to fit, you could sell a painting for $100, but instead you choose to sell it for $50). Another way to try and fit the analogy would be for those developers to think 'well, what would 1 copy of this game be worth to me', and then use that price (assuming it's above the profit maximising price), but that again isn't looking at the whole picture.



I fail to see how all of your 'credentials' prove that you couldn't take WoW to a console. Let's go through the various parts. Is a MMO(/MMORPG) subscription based model possible on a console? Yes, there have already been several (not very successful) examples of this being done.
Can a game be updated on a console? Again, yes.
Can RPGs from the PC be ported to the console? Yes

So, how is it impossible to bring out WoW on the console again? Remember, you're not arguing about affordibility here, you're arguing that it is impossible to make WoW work on a console to a "playable degree". Now from a playable point of view, if a game with as many menus+different controls such as morrowind can be ported from the PC to the console, I fail to see how something with a simpler user-interface+gameplay mechanics such as WoW couldn't be.

They don't its an opinion and I am listing my credentials to give you my perspective. Whether WoW can run on consoles and whether or not its market viable to make it run on consoles I think can better be answered by the fact that it currently does not.

And for pretty much everything else you said most of it at this point is putting words into my mouth and creating straw man arguments ex.



Never said developers wouldn't want to maximise profits for any given game I was pointing out that the motivation to make a game in the first place for small indie companies wouldn't be profit but instead artistic valuation. This does not preclude them from making as much money as possible off the sales of the game.


And your knowledge of the market is pretty academic, your pointing out the way it should work I am pointing out the way that it does work. It works almost entirely from speculation and growth for non-divedend stocks all you have to do is go look at how far stocks are over valued, crap google is something like 800% last time i checked.


And just to sum up all I am trying to point out with the entire argument around how americans determine value has more to do with its relation to this "pc gaming is dying argument" thats running around. Its not neccesarily reflective of some fundamental ideology. All thats really being said is that PC gaming is not a viable product for publically traded large development companies. Nor is it viable for start up capital driven private companies looking to sell and go public. There are exceptions to this but not alot. But for developers with a artistic motivation to produce games it is perfectly viable for private owned companies to produce PC games especially with the digital distribution publishing models offered through impulse and steam, oh and still make enough to feed themselves and maybe buy a new house/car every so often.

Everyone should be happy about this it will take a couple more years but the buy outs that caused all this market craziness around games in the late 90's early 2000 era, and unfortunatly ushered into what i like to call the "great game bloat of 2002-2008", should be relatively over and maybe well actually start getting more games made by gamers who want to actually produce quality games and are not just concerned with going public and making their fortunes. Its worth noting that this "sell out" craze didnt just affect PC gaming software but pretty much anything that touched PC's and the internet.

In other words the people making this "pc games are dying" argument are so far gone into the market driven capitalistic world view that they forgot that at its core games are not just commodities they are art and entertainment.

I don't wanna play a MMORPG on a console, though. MMO's are better on PC, where I can look up stuff in .5 seconds.

You see this just can't be the case. As long as a company can make profit at a reasonable rate of return (on investment) then a large company can operate just fine in the PC gaming market. For it to not be viable, and for only "small indie" companies to survive in the gaming market (assuming such developers gain a positive non-monetary benefit from producing a game), the profit opportunities would have to be so low that these small companies are only producing games because of this non-monetary benefit they gain, and without that they wouldn't because they couldn't earn enough money. That is, even if they could make more money for the same level of risk, they would focus on developing games, so in effect they are paying to make games. Such a scenario in the current state of PC gaming beggars belief, and is completely contradicted by the millions upon millions of dollars that the market is worth. For it to be the case, gaming companies on average would need to be making (and expected to continue to make) losses or very low levels of profit for the investment required. As already mentioned before, if it is possible to make profits at this level then a large firm stands to gain by moving into the market and earning such returns, and in turn it would benefit from a higher stock price.


You need to understand the basics/fundamentals of how the market works/is meant to work before being able to get to grips with the more realistic scenarios in the current world. Hence not having such an "academic" understanding means understanding of other situations is likely to be flawed. Let's take your example of a non-dividend stock; the rationale for growth+speculation only affecting this is that the firm is likely starting up, due to not paying a dividend; that is, it has many growth opportunities available to it such that it would be better off reinvesting money from dividends back into itself than paying it out. Investors in such a stock understand this, but also have the expectation that once it has grown and established itself in the market it can then start making large amounts of profits, and paying a dividend on this (if the company will never ever pay a dividend, and no-one thinks it will, then it's stock price will be near-worthless since you would never get money from it, and any gains would be capital and based off speculative bubbles that in turn would not be based on anything fundamental). So, the share price is a reflection of expectations of what this future stream of profits (distriburted in dividends) is likely to be. You can of course have speculative bubbles where people end up getting a bit divorced from reality in their expectations, and the price of a stock soars far ab ove what it really should be (or alternatively are basing their decisions only on expectations of capital gains and not profits, in which case the price is pretty much guaranteed to come crashing down at some point in the future when the realisation comes that the high share price isn't justified by anything), but that doesn't affect the underlying point - that share price movements are related to expectations of that company's profits.


Actually no, pretty well no-one should be happy if PC gaming deteriorated to such an extent that all the large/publicly listed companies were to leave the market. Why? Because it would mean fewer games, and likely at higher prices. As a consumer of PC games, I know that I would much rather have lots of games at low prices than a choice of only a few games at much higher prices each.

This is such a lame topic!  PC Gaming will go away when computers go away.  As that won't be happening anytime in the near future anyone that thinks PC gaming is dying is just plain diluted.

Maudlin yuor missing the point that there is this argument going around the PC gaming industry "PC Gaming is dying" and all I am really arguining with you about is the motivation behind the argument almost everything i have said i've said there are exceptions or caveats so why you keep on arguining with me that I am making an argument with no exceptions I just cant understand, your really kinda just arguing with yourself.

You also fail to see something I pointed out earlier about finite resources; these large companies that have gobbled up the smaller development shops who made the great games of the 90's, i.e. EA, have a finite resource pool of developers and other assets. That's fairly specific to the industry, it is after all art, and you do need talented artists and programmers and creative people and its not like digging a ditch where u can just go out and hire more diggers, speed up production or take more jobs and make more money. And what pretty much this entire lame ass argument is about is how much of those resources should a company like EA devote to making PC's versus console games. These industry insiders are saying consoles cause thats where the money is and there right. And i have pointed out thats this is not just due to demand its also due to the fact that PC games cost more to make because there more complex and require more testing. And there motivation no matter how much you want to deny it is that more profit means more short term market gains which means more money in executives pockets.

All of this would be fine except there is a stupid factor in this argument that comes into the mix when they turn it into a generalization that the whole PC gaming market is going to die. Thats simply not true as I have tried to point out private (for non market folks a private company is not listed on any stock market) will continue to make PC games because they have some love for PC gaming; some artistic valuation. And maudlin that doesnt mean that ONLY private companies will make games again back to para 1, so dont come back at me for the 4th time saying that im saying ONLY indie private companies are going to make game there are exceptions, namely A C T I V I S I O N / B L I Z Z A R D. And the indie private development shop is also going to have a leg up this time around because they don't have to rely on physical retail shops and be completly at the mercy of publishers, they can rely on good profits from digital distribution from steam and impulse. This should allow more private capital investment in these small shops and less up front deal-with-the-devil capital from the publishing companies.

And this is a pure sidenote, raw emo opinion, and speculation. It's almost as if there is so much love for gaming and so much "im not a sell-out" going on within these big companies that were seeing these kinda of bastard hybrid PC/Console games and these crazy insane desires to make PC gamers go to console or to produce this kinda of pancea programming idiom were we can make games for both the PC and console. And all we get as gamers is a really crappy end product, moreso on PC but console hurts from it as well (can anyone say oblivion?). I'm a human, survival of the fittest, capitalistic bastard, but im also a realist. These people are WHINY, human, survival of the fittest, capitalistic bastards, who live in some happy-fun land where PC and console games had sex and produced their version of ubermensch, and if they'd just admit to it and move on, and let the market move on, and game design move on, we'd all be enjoying much higher quality PC and console titles.


I'll end the argument here i have reiterated it enough and tried to explain my position to you several times, your free to have the last word. I wouldn't mind so much but it doesn't even feel as if your in this debate your putting up straw men and arguing around the central issue bringing up tertiary points that have no meaning. The central issue is that logically the "pc gaming is dying argument is dead" is a flawed argument. If they want to say "PC gaming wont be developed in significant numbers by publically traded companies" they would have a much better argument. There just grandstanding and being chicken little and its getting really annoying and ultimatly im not getting the same quality of PC Game i got 10 years ago so im personally a little peeved. If anything the gaming industry as a whole simply needs better analysts, critics, and commentators.

Actually it's you who have failed to see something despite me pointing it out fairly early on; It's fair to assume diminishing returns to scale wrt developing a PC game and the no. of developers/game designers required to be working on it. It's also fair to assume that is half the people drop out of a market and no-one new comes to fill their place, the market share of those remaining will increase, as well as various other effects, such as them being able to make much more money for the same thing (to view it more simply, if you produce a game at the moment, and half of the games you're competing against suddenly are removed, your sales are going to increase)
As such to argue that EA would move every single person into consoles and not have anyone working on PC games is highly unlikely since they are large enough that the specialisation gains that might make that a viable/likely strategy for a very small group of developers won't be such a factor.


This is no doubt another argument of yours borne from a lack of understanding of the true reasons behind such decisions. I've already gone through this once, but here it is again for you: The more graphics in a game the higher the cost of making it, but the more likely people are to buy it (you'd buy a game with amazing graphics over an identical one but without good graphics for example). The company will therefore estimate the point at which their profits will be maximised (too much spent on resources and the extra cost borne from a 'graphic improvement' won't be compensated fully by an increase in sales as a result of that, so you do it up to the point where the marginal cost is equal to the marginal benefit). So no, spiralling costs is, as with all your other arguments so far, not going to cause all big companies to suddenly leave the market.

Oh and since you keep contradicting yourself (one moment large public companies can't survive, next moment they can):





So to summarise, you're saying that as a general rule large public companies won't be able to survive, but private ones will? You can't claim both that large public companies won't survive, and in the same breath say that you're not saying that !


No, there's absolutely nothing wrong with hybrids, and I applaud them since it means much more choice for everyone. A hybrid will be made if the costs of making/porting it are deemed lower than the profit that will be brought in as a result of it (from increased sales). So for example if you own a PC but not an Xbox360 you can still play mass effect (if you don't mind all the DRM) thanks to it being on the PC as well as the 360. If however you view such games as "bastards" then you don't have to ever get them. As usual, what gamers want is what matters here, since a company who wants to maximise their profits will be looking to satisfy their demands.


Nope, both arguments are flawed. You've still failed to present any reason for publicly traded companies suddenly suffering an outbreak of the bubonic plague, and so arguing that publicly traded (PC gaming focused) companies are dying is just as flawed. As long as profit can be made from the market, these companies will remain. And that will be the case unless some phenominal new technology comes around that completely obsoletes the computer, in which case it will then start dying.

Feel free to insert "straw men" into your post as many times as you like, but as long as you try and argue that publicly traded companies are dying wrt PC gaming (and failing to present evidence to support this), I'm going to keep on disagreeing.

Real Answer: bit torrent, pirate bay, torrent reactor, etc., etc.

If you wanna make sure it dies, go do that.