I don't know that it's dying but it does seem to be in a recession of sorts.

I've been playing PC games for a long, long time and I've played and bought tons of games.

For me, I don't care that much for RTS and only play the very best of FPS, and those 2 genres seem to be the bulk of what gets released.

I miss the older days of PC gaming where most of the titles were strategy oriented or were more like "pc games" than console games made for PCs.

What truly boggles my mind is that a lot of the best titles, genres, and styles of PC games from before RTS or FPS even existed or became popular are never revisited or revived - instead, everything is remade into yet another damned RTS or FPS (like how Bethesda is bastardizing and morrowindifying Fallout). Nobody makes anything like the old BG games. Nobody makes anything like Colonization (well, they do, but it they're graphically bloated RTS style and just not the same).

There are a lot of excellent things that have come about thru the evolution of PC gaming but to me a lot of the magic of older games is missing from many of today's titles.

Im sorry but thats a pretty stupid arguement.. You might as well say that console gaming is dieing even more because they constantly strive for just that, better gfx that require a new console.

The real reason why PC gaming is dieing, imo. Is the fucking fuzz to get a game started.

With console games, you insert the game, and play. THE END:
It always works. It always runs well. Hardly ever any graphical anomalies, or gamestopping bugs, or crashes, and NEVER any driver incompatabilities.

With PC games, you install (not such a big deal), then you play.
Then with 90% of all games, you notice that its released before its done, resulting in graphical anomalies, crashes or memory leaks (includes GalCiv2 of old), desyncs (Supcom?). Or simply a game FULL of bugs making it utterly unplayable (Loki's mouse-click-wont-register bug, or the entire game of Vanguard).
Hell, anyone remember Oblivion? It took like 6 months before anyone could run that at max graphics in a reasonable framerate with the latest graphics cards (which had horrible drivers for almost a year). Not to mention the hundreds of mods required to make it the game you want it to be, resulting in mod incompatabilities, forcing you to manually edit files and the load order.

And lets not forget about the wonderful $$ companies that create the biggest scam known to the cyberage, copy-protection. Forcing you to be connected to the internet to play a game you already PAID for, or simply not letting you play a game you again PAID for due to the dvd checking being bugged beyond repair..

Thats pc gaming. Its not gaming, its pc dickin about, then possibly gaming for an hour.
Thats why im sick of PC games. After 11 years of building computers and being a diehard PC fanboy, im sick of it.
I wont accept it anymore.
There are ALWAYS tons and tons of bugs, gfx anomalies, slow slow framerate even tough some games look like SHIT, some games run smooth and look amazing, but then there is ANOTHER bug or something wrong. Maby online play doesnt even work. (Sunage, im looking at you, probably the best RTS since Starcraft, ruined by no onlineplay at release, resulting in 0 people online now that they got it working since everyone gave up on it.)

PC games will do well with an indie development team because two people can take an open-source engine and make it into a wonder of computing, while leaving it easy enough to use.

The idea that all freeware games are crappy is bad, because, quite simply, many commercial games are crappy too. The freeware games are met with more opposition, and many do suck, but there are always some that strive to be better than the rest and succeed.

Examples: ADOM, AssaultCube, Battle for Wesnoth, Cave Story, Cube, Dwarf Fortress, Eternal Daughter, Frets on Fire, Gate88, GearHead series, GeneRally, Glest, Icy Tower, N, Sauerbraten, Seiklus, Vega Strike, from the limited category of "always free" freeware games, not including free to play and commercial to freeware, and some open source. And this is just from the list on Wikipedia that I have tried.

Dear God, take an economics class...

The initial cost of developing an object is irrelevant to the price needed to make a reasonable profit. It's the cost of replicating that throws a wrench in the idea that games should have adjusted with the rate of inflation and development costs.

Replication costs have gone through the floor. It's almost nothing to stamp CD's, the cost of printing a manual now compared to 20 years ago is a very nice fortune saved. Development costs are going up, yes. Replication costs are continually decreasing. Printing media becomes cheaper, the stack of floppies were replaced by disks that don't have moving parts. The key in selling a product that has massive development costs and very little replication cost is to sell more of it. If they jacked the price up to $100 with their current shelf life, they'd all go bankrupt inside a year. The highest selling games have always been ones that stuck around on the shelves for a long time. They sold far more copies of Half-life at $20 than they did at $50. I doubt they'd make more money if they started them off lower, but they'd sure as hell make more money if they could keep them around on shelves longer or drop them down faster. At least half the games I've waited to hit $20 disappeared first and I forgot about them instead.

Regardless, the argument is irrelevant. PC gaming has no shrinkage, period. It is shrinking as a percentage of the market share in a rapidly expanding market. There are more PC games being sold now than there were 10 years ago, there's simply more console games being sold as well. It's like saying Porsche was wiped out by Volkswagen. This is not to say PC's are performance dream machines and consoles are bugs, although it's not terribly bad an analogy. The Porsche company has been healthy the entire time despite the rise of Volkswagen because they sold to the upper crust, and weren't losing sales, just becoming a smaller part in an expanding market of middle class drivers. When PC sales actually start declining, instead of shrinking in market share, then you get worried. The huge mega publishers might get out because it's too small a share for them to bother with, but they pump out shit for the most part anyway. Most of the good stuff is made by indy developers, they'll go to places like Stardock when the big fish get out of the pond.

Why did you tell the Lord to take an economics class?

The price of developing an game might be high, but if you expect it to gross 20M copies, why charge so extortionately for each one? It cuts down sales and will limit return-appeal. Plus, it's not like it costs more than ten dollars max to create and ship a game's physical part.

Say, where did the 20 million copies bit come from? According to wiki, if you exclude bundles with the consoles, the list of games to break 20 million across all platforms consists of the original Poke'mon and The Sims, that's it. The bundled ones only add four more. I'd aim for 1-2 million for expected sales from a high budget PC game.

This is really quite informative if you have a historical knowledge of the games in the lists.

Also, that's cursing, if I disappear, either I was banned or He smote me.

Q3 isn't anywhere near "perfectly good" for any modern FPS game. Torque is crap (I've see it, I own a license to it. It's crap). And those "thousands of open source" engines are ultimately weak.

An engine isn't just a library that manages your game; it's an asset pipeline with associated exporting, converting, and packaging tools. Most of those open-source engines don't have them (or they're crap), and thus, you have to spend a long time writing those tools yourself.

If you want to make something that can stand alongside Call of Duty 4, HL2, or other high-end games, you're going to need a real engine, not one of those open source things.



Wow, that's a remarkable fantasy world you live in.



Super Mario Bros 3 is probably the highest selling non-pack-in title for any platform ever. It only sold 18 million, and that was almost 20 years ago. GTA IV, for all its hype, will not crack 20 million. Halo 3, for all its hype, will not crack 20 million.

Games simply don't sell 20 million copies. A blockbuster games sells 2 million. Most game developers are happy with 500,000 in sales.

Q3 is fine enough for most games, Torgue is actually good, but it doesn't do everything (only the TES engine does, and you can get it cheap, but others have to buy it (Oblivion/Morrowind, I have seen total conversions)). Second, divide 20M by 500,000. That should mean that I pay no more than $42 for a 20M budget game. Not many games have a budget that big.

Second, are you saying that Tremulous and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, wouldn't be good in a commercial market? Both of them are based off of an engine that's open-source, or have a similar engine available.

Third, ever heard of "Mount&Blade"? The shareware game that was made by a couple, and got a major publisher deal? It's not too hard to make a good game if you have a good idea and the know how and determination.

Heck, you want something that'll run a game, develop the models, do pretty much anything for you? Use Blender. It's free, open source, commercial-quality, and has its own engine with physics. You cannot convince me it's impossible to make a commercial quality game for little or no money. It's been done.

Sorry Alfonse, but you fail. And after I provided a link to the list too, typing slow bites eh?

The Sims sold 50 million copies. The king of games that is, I'll never play it on principle alone, but it sold like rubbers.

Sorry Alfonse, but you fail. And after I provided a link to the list too, typing slow bites eh?

The Sims sold 50 million copies. The king of games that is, I'll never play it on principle alone, but it sold like rubbers.

Death to the double poster!

BS. It is functional for boxed-in FPS's and 3rd-person shooters. But it simply doesn't look good by today's standards and you can't do anything remotely approaching "outdoors" with it.

Oh, and the code is hard to use.



No, Torque (it's a "Q", not a "G") is not good. I'm a programmer, I've seen its code. It is crap.

Yes, you can make games with it. But nobody wants to; they do it because it would be very slightly easier than making their own from scratch.



Nonsense. The store has to get its cut for stocking it, the distributer has to get their cut for shipment costs, etc. At the end of the day, the developer may only see $10 per copy sold if that. The increase to $60 allows developers and publishers to double the rate of return per game sold.

Further, this assumes that you can't expect



ET:QWs is already on the commercial market. And the Doom3 Engine (which ET:QW is based on) is most certainly not Open Source. Also, if you have even a passing familiarity with ET:QW, you would know that they made major modifications to the Doom3 engine for the game.

And no, Tremulous would not be good in the commercial market. Not for $50. Probably not for $20. It can't hang with CoD4, TF2, or any modern multiplayer FPS.



It was started by a couple. They've expanded since then. Plus, they haven't actually released a game yet; it's still in beta.



You think Blender3D's pathetic game engine can be used to create a "commercial quality" game? You've got to be kidding, right?

Hmm... no editing...

Well, allow me to finish this sentence, "Further, this assumes that...":

Further, this assumes that the developer/publisher doesn't want to make a profit. You know, profit? That thing that companies like to make? And by "like to", I mean "exist for no purpose other than to".

Rate of return per game sold is dependent on the number of games sold. Supply and demand fluctuate with price, rising to $60 will net them a loss in numbers to go with their increase in per unit revenue, possibly leading to an increase in overall revenue to offset the development costs, possibly leading to less revenue.

Also, stores don't ignore price when factoring their percentage of the proceeds. If they upped the price to $60, the stores would expect more as well.

The problem with pc gaming is piracy. Look at the sales of cross platform games sometime. Good pc versions tend to sell 1/4 of the copys or less, even though there are way more pcs in the market capable of playing that game vs. xboxes or ps3s. Hell if I know the answer to this problem though. I am conficted, because I belive totally in freedom of speach, but I am still glad when the commies at torrentspy or others get shut down.