What has caused the fall in PC game sales?

[Par4]

Half Life, too complicated??? LOL!!

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King Par4!!

fldmarshallpar4@icqmail.com

There is no spoon
-The Matrix
Let's kick it up a notch!!
-Emeril Lagasse
Fresh Soy makes Tofu so silky
-Ming Tsai

[Zkribbler]

I'm also piling onto the mindseye bandwagon. Too many games being sold today a lousy with obvious bugs.

"Cutthroats" could have been a great game, but even after loading Patch 6.0 it still has problems. Privateer II had stupidous graphics, but you can only play until the first time you're attacked by a space pirate--your guns are too weak to puncture his shields and you can't run away. So there you sit until he kills you or you die of boredom.

Plus, there's very little originality now. All game ideas seem to be rip offs from other games.

[Urban Ranger]

Par4: no game is too complicated for somebody who actually likes Starfleet Battles, or at least Civ

[My Wife Hates CIV]

complicated...

I'd say M1 Tank Platoon II or Falcon 4.0 takes that award.

[CapTVK]

I would like to add my thoughts on the poor quality of released games:

Last week I bought the discounted version of Jagged Alliance 2. The version in the box was 1.02 so it had already been patched (I thought). The game was mildly interesting but the interface spoiled a lot of the fun. What was worse were the crashes. It turned out that some essential tilegraphics were missing. So they couldn't be loaded. And if they didn't load, the game crashed, end period.


I later found a patch to fix this but the damage was already done. Once again I found myself "burned" by bad software. The only relieve I had was that I didn't pay the full pound for this. This is totally inexcusable, in the old days(C64,A500) games didn't crash and in those days the development time was already hefty so there must have been plenty of bugs to crawl into the system. Yet the released software was bug free. you would think that QA would have improved throughout the years

If this sort of software keeps being released I won't shed a tear when the industry crashes and burns.

Maybe we have to start rebuilding the house from scratch...

[Sophanthro]

Well you can thank the internet for the release of buggy games, before the internet releasing premature would never fly. I mean I'll buy a buggy game late once the Patches have come out(CTP), maybe I shouldn't.

I quick summary of why there are more bugs released now.
1. The internet.

2. There is alot more code per game now.

3. Differences in hardware, mainly in the realm of 3d.

4. More money spent on marketing. If your hyping it you better release it.

5. Decline in sales. They need the money today.

6. Windows itself is unstable. Don't know if that contributes or not.

[tonic]

The only strategy games I've played are Civ and Civ2 and the simulation genre represented by the Simcity series. I'm with the majority here who feel there is too much hype and not enough substance in the new games on offer.

We could all save money and gain peace of mind by supporting the current trend towards the cooperative open GNU format. I am quite sure that in the future we will have truly novel games instead of just clones as we have now with Freeciv (Openciv might be a comptetitor for Civ3?).

[Steve Clark]

To add an example of the childish mentalities of gaming magazines, in the August issue of PC Gamer, the first paragraph of one the E3 games (Max Payne I think) said that it's 'way cool' and 'kicks a**' (or something to that effect). Any PC games that come with a kicks a** description is gotta be garbage, imo. They certainly wouldn't be saying childish things like about Civ3. But then again, Civ3 will appeal to those gamers that like to think.

[MOBIUS]

Sloppy coding and PC elitism?

1)Sloppy coding - remember the super playable Spectrum 48k games, some of those are still very enjoyable as emulators...!

48k for a whole game for christ's sake!!!

Now there's this brownian motion/parkinson's law attitude to game writing which is that these games HAVE to use the very best PC's...

Maybe if game designers made their code more efficient and 'tiered' the design of games to be able to run on less than optimum platforms, more people would buy them...?

2)PC elitism - if you haven't got a Killer machine, you can't play the game... Frankly it's dizzying how fast PC's are speeding up! Out of all PC owners, I wonder what percentage have say P300's or better?

What I and my friends do is play games at a LAN 'Cafe' Licenced to sell alcohol...

They have 20 of the fastest machines built specifically for GAMES...! Sure @ $7.50/hr it's more expensive than buying the games, but at least I can play them the way they should be played with my friends without having to buy a new PC every few months...

I've bought in the last two years CtP, Half Life and AOE II...

Two of those I've bought only because I need a FPS and RTS game to 'keep sharp' for The Playing Fields...